Eggblogg

An example of why social media shouldn't be outsourced

I was recently followed on Twitter by an acccount claiming to be a social media agency, whose tweetstream consists entirely of brags and ads. 

You know the sort of thing: XYZ client tells us how great we are, outsource your social media to us, we're the greatest, etc. Some of the ads were promos for their clients. Many tweets were repeated every week or so, with the wording just slightly changed (sometimes). I went back six months and the pattern was the same. Nothing of information, nothing helpful, no RTs, no real conversation.

This is a good example of poor practice. If you're not sure why, feel free to check out my post at Social Media Today on "10 ways I plan to become a better Twitter user".

Why should this bother me? Because, although there are plenty of Twitter accounts of this kind, they are not generally run by people who claim to know about social media. And who presumably (because they advocate 'outsourcing') run their clients' accounts in the same way. 

It's a bit like the early days of search engine optimisation (SEO) when companies sprang up, making all kinds of promises to small businesses. This usually involved the SEO company creating and hosting hundreds of doorway pages on the client's behalf (amongst other things). Did they deliver great results? Short term, sometimes yes. Long term, the company was liable to be penalised by Google for using black hat techniques, and when the client left them the SEO firm would simply pull the pages - end of rankings.

Don't get me wrong, SEO can be outsourced very effectively - it's increasingly complex and specialised. but social media is different altogether. Companies must do it themselves - perhaps in conjunction with consultancy & training, and/or account co-management. The ideal to aim for is for 'social' to permeate every pore of the client company. But until this is better understood there will always be those with a little bit of knowledge prepared to jump on the social media expert bandwagon and try making money from it.

Social media activities need to be sustainable in-house and owned by an organisation's people. It is not an add-on and it is not 'just another marketing channel'. Hand it over to a third party at your peril.

Welcome to 2012 and the growth of long-term thinking... maybe!

What's going to be significant in 2012? I tend to leave the annual predictions up to others, but at the start of a new year it's very tempting to at least reflect and take stock.

Last year my loose round up of promising trends included QR codes, a new 'blogging golden age' and the growth of storytelling. Blogging does seem to be as strong as ever, but I'm not sure QR codes are being used effectively - at the moment they are 'the thing to have', appearing on billboards and newspaper pages like a rash. But who knows if anyone is actually scanning them or finding them useful.

However I do think we're going to hear a LOT more about storytelling and narrative, particularly as businesses start to better understand the real impact and potential of social media.

I also have a strong feeling that Google+ will grow in popularity and usage. For example, just today I read this post about how more US retailers prefer the Google+ button to Facebook like buttons. But whether its 'Twitter moment' will come this year I don't know. Although we're continually bombarded with information about the speed of technological change, attitudes and habits take longer to form. (As does the infrastructure. While gadgetry improves at the speed of light, we still have to put up with phone networks which seem to be from the era of the horse and cart. Frustrating.)

Something I'd like to predict, but I don't think it's going to happen any time soon for many businesses, is the move from short-termism to long term thinking. Quick wins, campaigns, micro-monitoring... I believe there's a danger in taking too narrow a view of things at the expense of achieving long-term results and systematic change. I realise that sounds a bit of a general statement, so I promise to follow up with examples of what I mean.

Social media usage at work: get used to it

My eye was drawn recently to a piece in the FSB (Federation of Small Businesses) magazine 'The Voice'. Under the heading 'A Cyber Plan for Businesses' is a report on the 'comprehensive guidance' from ACAS designed to help business 'get to grips with the cyber problem.' In it we are told that 'many staff are abusing access (to social media) when they should be working, by looking at personal websites, posting derogatory messages about managers and colleagues or buying and selling online.'

My heart sinks when I read this, not only because of the language ('cyber problem'??) but because it's this kind of thinking that IS the problem.

If staff are bored enough at work to be on Facebook or Ebay all day, or posting derogatory things about co-workers, what does that say about the workplace? It's all too easy to blame the internet rather than asking searching questions about poor management and staff morale!

It's time for ACAS, and other bodies with responsibility for shaping policy and opinion, to wake up and smell the social coffee. Social media is here to stay and trying to stop people from doing anything social online whilst at work is entirely counterproductive.

Businesses should be identifying the best social networkers, encouraging them and harnessing their skills and interest to work on behalf of the business. It's not an easy option but it beats trying to hold back the tide. And there are enough examples around to emulate. Let's get with the 21st century already!

 

Reducing your social web presence to a number

In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything turned out to be 42, after a computer spent 7.5 million years working it out.*

I can't help being reminded of that when reading all the hoo-ha lately about Klout messing with its algorithm, to the disgruntlement of Klout-ers worldwide. 

The #kloutpout is all about scores being adjusted downwards, cries of bias in favour of iphone users and accusations of social media snobbery (it's not what you do on the social web that counts, they're saying, but who you mix with...)

It's hard not to be sucked into the competitiveness of 'scoring', or any kind of system that allows you to compare yourself favourably to others, but let's not get carried away with the reduction of human behaviour, relationships and interraction to a number. Klout needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, surely.

*Although the answer to the 'ultimate question' was 42, the question remained unknown!

Image: http://sprained-spain.tumblr.com/ 

How I fell in and out of love with Apple

After all the hoo-ha about the resignation of Steve Jobs (someone on Twitter remarked that "anyone would think he was dead") and having read recently about the new store that Apple wants to open at 100 Cheapside in the city of London, I'm once again wondering at the appeal of Apple.

In about 1998 I was working at adidas in the US and the cool people on the design team were real Apple heads. They tried to persuade me that a Mac was way more desirable than a PC. Hey, I came close to switching - I quite fancied one of those blueberry iBooks when they came out... but they were hellish expensive, so I stuck with PCs for another few years. Until about 2008 that is, when I finally succumbed to the peer pressure (or marketing?) and bought a 24" iMac with its beautiful glass screen.

Was it a revelation? Not really. Learning how to use a Mac took some weeks, just to master the basics, and being more or less self taught I'm aware that I probably only know about 10% of what I could usefully know. But everyone used to say it was so intuitive! That I'd never want to go back! In reality I was struck by how rigid everything was, how inflexible, how it was impossible to get 'under the hood' of a Mac, how you have to do things a certain way, usually unguessable and random. For some reason I then went and bought an iPhone, and realised how totally on the Steve Jobs path to 'computer says no' hell I was.

I went from being reasonably interested in computers and tolerant of their shortcomings, to just another frustrated user moaning about her machine/gadgets. The irony is of course that by the time I switched over to Macs, PCs had come on apace, the dreaded Windows XP was on its way out and PCs were even starting to look like Macs.

I would love to be free of Apple, but it's hard - it feels like I'm in a relationship and it's not a healthy one. And yet so many people still really love Apple. I'm in awe of how it styled itself into the 'good guy' opposite the 'evil' Bill Gates and Microsoft. I used to think it was about the products, but it has to be way, way more than that. Doesn't it?