Part of Q3 (What’s your criteria for hiring people?)
And find out for sure how many digital natives your agency’s hired recently. You definitely don’t want them playing catch up.
This I think is huge. And you know what? If the company says they’ve hired 10 new digital natives/Generation Y staff in the last year, ask them to show you a sample of their blogs/Twitter stream/etc to give you an idea of what these people are up to. This is a definite sign, trust me.
Q5
What are five recent creative ideas that aren’t ads?
This could be anything. An interesting use of social bookmarking for internal archiving purposes, running a new project entirely on Google Wave, using Facebook as the new company “intranet” to share information – something that demonstrates out of the box thinking which isn’t client driven – ie there’s some innovation from within.
The entire article is pretty good and definitely worth a read, and so are the comments. Once you’ve checked that out, what do you think? What questions do you need to ask your prospective ad agency?
Let me start by saying I write this post from a job hunter’s point of view. For the longest time I’ve been telling friends to do something, anything in the social media scene while they’re still in school to help them when they’re looking for a job. Designers have portfolios, why shouldn’t knowledge workers have something similar?
Without a doubt the most commonly used excuse is “oh you’re in marketing it’s a different industry”. I think this is absolutely untrue. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the finance industry, law, medicine, HR, anything, social media can be used to strengthen your network and give you an advantage.
In the process of research at work I’ve come across people who podcast about comics as a means of promoting their store to financial institutions producing videos on the financial crisis to people who blog about plastics and chemicals to people asking questions about pottery on LinkedIn. There is space for every niche, it’s just whether or not you’re willing to look for it.
Tomorrow: three ways anyone can get started to contributing to their niche in social media.
My mum showed me this article from the Straits Times a few days ago, with the headline: “Blogs’ reach limited: Study“, stating that mainstream media is still the key source of news and views, at least socio-politically. (Straits Times: It literally took me just about four minutes to find the link to that page. Why doesn’t Google pick up your stuff and why is your archival system so bad?)
So what I want to comment on, is this paragraph:
Mr Tan compared the several thousand readers who tune in to socio-political websites The Online Citizen (TOC) and The Wayang Party Club to The Straits Times’ circulation of nearly 400,000 and its readership of 1.3 million.
Without going on all day, here are my quick thoughts:
I suppose newspapers being awesome have nothing to do with the numerous newspapers shutting down worldwide. (Here are some Google search results)
Of the 400,000 circulation, how many people actively care about the “socio-political” commentary?
Straits Times has a “readership” of 1.3 million, which means the 400,000 circulation is roughly passed along three times. Or in the case of my family, seven of us (including the dog) have access to the Straits Times, but maybe one person reads it regularly. (The dog used to eat it regularly. Talk about consuming the news.)
I suppose the “readership” applies to army camps where they have one copy of it but it’s shared by 30 people, most of whom don’t manage to get their hands on it
The websites with “several thousand readers” (why no figures?) are actively being sought out, compared to newspapers.
The people seeking out that content are particularly motivated and highly engaged in the source material
If I were in an organisation (non-profit, cause, school, company, government), I’d easily trade 5,000 newspaper “readers” for 1 person actively searching for my content
Reach means nothing.
What are your thoughts? Are articles like this just plain in denial? Or is there really something here?
Tonight wrapped up my Film 240 class here at Queen’s University called “Media & Popular Culture”. One question asked was “Do you use RSS?” and the poll came to about 15% saying yes (which is not far off from the recent 11% RSS adoption rate that was researched). [No, I didn't count hands raised. The poll was done using electronic clickers so the percentages are shown instantaneously on screen.]
If these are the numbers for the more functional and popular tools, I’m expecting the figures for other avenues of web2.0 in education (wikis, social bookmarking, blogs, document collaboration) to be much lower.
So my questions tonight to you are:
1) Do you think these numbers are generally reflective, or should they be higher or lower?
2) If you don’t know about these tools, do you wish someone would teach you how to use them?
3) If you do know about these tools and discovered about them yourself, do you wish someone had introduced you to them earlier?
4) What aspects of education would you be most keen to utilise social media tools?
5) Do you even think such Web2.0 tools have a place in education?
6) If you’ve heard of tools like RSS, Twitter, Wikis, etc, what’s stopping you from using them?
I really, really wanna hear from you, so help me out. If you already know the tools, pass this post on to someone who doesn’t, and ask them to answer the questions!
On a personal note, if you’d like to collaborate with me on an SMU project similar to the one Hack College did, drop me a line!
Sometimes you (aka the social media manager, PR person, whatever) may stumble upon a blog or forum that’s perfect for you to… “seed” your product or service (I really hate that term. Seed.). For example, you have this list-keeping tool that seems perfect for, oh, a productivity blog. The tendency may be to “casually” reply to a blog post about lists and mention “oh I use this app” in an attempt to make it sound credible. Maybe it might look a little like this (click for larger image):
Not Being Transparent
At first glance, it does sound like a productivity/GTD/insert-your-vertical-here enthusiast talking about his favourite app or service. Here’s the thing: if you don’t mention at the very beginning that you’re intimately associated with the product, this is what happens (click for larger image):
Getting Caught
Needless to say, this “outing” has serious implications for your credibility and you’ve probably just lost any chance of “seeding” at this blog again. (No, changing names or using an anonymous name is not the solution).
Have you had experiences like this before? What do you think someone like this could do to earn back some trust? Air your views!
Jasmine from my social media class tagged me for a meme for “7 Useless Facts About Myself” and I thought this would be pretty cool to do, but I’d tweak it to fit the theme of the blog. So here we go:
I had my first “blog” (well it was called a website then) in 1997 (when I was 13). Links and archives weren’t the norm back then, so basically each time I added in new info the page grew longer and longer and longer.
Before blogging “seriously” at this blog, I’ve covered everything from comic books, music, movies, books, food, you name it.
I used to be a guest writer for Fanboy planet (one article here) back in 2002
The first friend I made online is also my closest. We met in a chat room.
I was always very proud of my ICQ number having only 7 digits (early adopters rule!)
Until I moved here, I blogged by manually tweaking html codes. ie manually inserting dates, links, pictures, etc by typing out the html codes.
Despite being a very heavy web user from 1997, I’ve never made any money from it.
There you have it. I won’t tag anyone, but feel free to replicate this on your blog and share something fun about you and your passion!
Well now that we know what Mitch Joel would say about the content or popularity post, I’ve been thinking about it and I would say that there’s definitely a divide/separation/segregation between the content blogs, and what I like to call the Meepok Blogs, where people type “today I went to eat meepok” or whatever they had for breakfast. (For non-Singaporeans, meepok is a type of noodle available at most places).
So knowing that these different types of blogs exist, my next question would be: Where does the interaction, or possibility of interaction, exist between the two “genres” of blogs?
I realise that content bloggers very rarely have Meepok posts, and similarly the other way round. In fact I remember reading an advertising blog that wasn’t half bad, until the author posted something that sounded a lot like a personal, whiny rant, which was just so jarring and inconsistent with the advertising of the blog.
So what do you think? Is it inevitable to have this divide between Meepok and non-Meepok blogs? Or is there some interaction, hidden or otherwise, where all these authors come together?
Update: From Mitch Joel:
“I think Journey finding a singer like this answers your question. There are enough people looking for all sorts of different stuff that it’s the niches that matter.
It’s a story like this that inspires someone like Christopher S. Penn and myself to be re-energized about this space.
It sounds like you’re trying to create a co-relation between this type of media and Mass Media – you can’t.
Some niches have bigger audiences – and some people play towards that bigger audience.”
Propelled by the fact that Xiaxue actually was deemed important enough to be included in the National Library’s archival, I checked her blog to find that there are in the region of 16,000+ visits per day.
Admittedly, I initially thought that this was some inflated number or spam or something, but looking closer at her comments, they’re in the 300+ region for a post. Given that it’s widely accepted that content is written by 1-2% of the population (so 300 comments translates to roughly 15,000 readers), it’s probably a somewhat accurate figure.
So I’m really wondering what someone like Mitch Joel or Seth Godin’s take on this would be. I wonder if it’s a local phenomenon, or if this is seen elsewhere as well. (Tila Tequila points to it being the same case, at least in the US).
I kinda think the fact that someone who literally blogs randomness about her life gets 16,000 hits a day, is probably a little hard to swallow for those people trying to really do good for the community and make the world a better place.
From a marketing point of view, it’s amazing though. I could send Xiaxue a free product of mine, and instantly generate word of mouth among 16,000 other people.
Who knew when we were learning about “gatekeepers” of communities, they might one day refer to her.
I had a little dicussion with Dor about blogs around the time I set this up, and she chose Wordpress and Blogspot as her favourites, and I chose Wordpress and LiveJournal (LJ). Let’s take a look why:
Wordpress
RSS
Tags
Categories
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
LiveJournal:
You know when your comments are replied to (I really want this function)
I have to admit I’m a little peeved with Google tonight. Buttons I could find using Toolbar 4 I couldn’t find using Toolbar 5, and editing bookmarks on Toolbar 5 is a chore because it opens Google Notebook (although I love Google notebook). I hope all this gets ironed out by the time Toolbar 5 gets out of beta stage.
I came across this article titled Five questions every CMO should ask a prospective ad agency and want to draw attention to two specific questions.
