Sunday, February 21st, 2010
I’ve been on an intentional hiatus the last week or so (yes, it was also Chinese New Year here in Singapore so it’s been busy with public holidays and visiting and all that), but also to take some down time to think.
Something that I keep thinking about (partially influenced by Seth Godin’s Linchpin) is wondering who matters.
Why do we chase digital business from the huge corporations who say they want digital but time and time again the end result is “go peddle your social media stuff somewhere else” and buy a TV ad.
Because the big organisations look better on a company portfolio than the mom and pop shop who really does want to embrace digital and probably will pay you less?
Why do we spend hours on decks and creative for an audience that isn’t receptive?
Aren’t they the equivalent of your whining customers that we always tell ourselves (or our clients) to sacrifice and go after those who love you, your business, your service instead?
So who matters?
[image credit: LINE architecture]
Tags: ad, chinese new year, company portfolio, digital media, embrace digital, linchpin, public holidays, seth godin, Singapore, social media, tv, who matters
Posted in social media business | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
So you hear the good news that your boss/client wants to get started with a social media strategy. Before you start jumping for joy, does the conversation sound anything like this?
Boss: Let’s get on social media – let’s start with Twitter
You: Why? What’s the objective?
Boss: We’ll think about that later, just do it
If that’s what it sounds like, I can almost guarantee in 6 to 12 months that very person is going to be asking you “so how have we done on Twitter?” and you’re going to say “err but we didn’t specify any goals” and it’s going to be a one way ticket to hell. And you know what? In all likelihood if you’re doing it for the sake of “just doing it”, it’s probably not going to be work you’re going to be proud of anyway.
Instead, the conversation should go something like this:
Boss: Let’s get on social media – let’s start with Twitter
You: Why? What’s the objective?
Boss: I want to use it to improve customer service
You: So we’re going to monitor all mentions of our brand and respond to complaints and rectify them?
Boss: Yes
Replace “Twitter” with “Facebook” or “blog”, replace “improve customer service” with “increase lead generation” or “decrease costs’ and you get the gist.
Ideally it should go even further than this to identify whose time will be allocated to this, how much time and how the initiative will be measured.
You need to do this from the get go. Set the expectation early that social media efforts – while free/cheap – take time. Don’t let your desire to do some social media work/please your boss/please your client get in the way of this. It’ll save you a world of hurt later.
How do you deal with “just do it” requests? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
[image credits: themachobox]
Tags: blog, brand mentions, customer service, decrease costs, facebook, increase lead generation, just do it, leadgen, social media, social media goal, social media objective, social media strategy, themachobox, ticket to hell, twitter
Posted in Poor Practices, social media, social media business | 5 Comments »
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Ignore
Two days ago I posted about people being a big danger of social media marketing because of what they might say on various channels without thinking about the consequences.
But on a more personal (though it can be corporate) level, inaction is equally damning.
When someone adds you (the communication professional of the company) on, say, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, and you wait a week before replying – what does that say about you as an individual, and as a representative as a company?
They add you and you accept it two weeks later – they’re not important.
They ask a question and you never answer it - they’re beneath you.
You ask your community a question but then don’t respond to the answers – you’re disinterested and insincere.
In the above cases you’d be better off not being involved in the social space at all.
I have to admit this is something I struggle with personally. Sometimes people I meet once at conferences want to connect on Facebook and that might be a little too personal for me so I procrastinate and before long it’s a month and by then, accepting the invitation lets the other party know I metaphorically sat on it for a month, thus conveying the message they weren’t important enough to accept within a few days.
There’s no easy answer to this question. Some people will be comfortable accepting every invitation, others will be more selective. It’s not so much the style that matters, but being aware that whichever route you choose to take (or not take) communicates something to that person or group of people.
How do you deal with the many requests you get on social channels? Do you ignore some? Ask them to add you on a less personal channel like Twitter instead of Facebook? I’d love to hear from you.
[image from Spraytint]
Tags: communication, communication professional. twitter, company representative, danger of social media marketing, facebook, inaction, LinkedIn, social channels, social media
Posted in facebook, online identity, social media | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Cogs in a machine
Seth Godin has a great 14 page pdf on ChangeThis titled Brainwashed.
What brainwashing does he speak of?
..to teach you that you’re average. That compliant work is the best way to a reliable living. That creating average stuff for average people again and again is a safe and easy way to get what you want
Believe you me, no one understands and relates to this statement more than someone who grew up in the Singaporean education system. The system itself is great (I think I benefited from a stressful education) but the mentality of playing it safe is overwhelming.
And so generations of students turned into generations of cogs… We were brainwashed into fitting in, and then discovered that the economy wanted people who stood out instead
Too true isn’t it? That’s why the idea of personal branding resonates so much with Generation Y. We’re not here to fit into pigeon-holed roles. We love dealing with other people who stand out instead of people who blend into the background. It’s a delight to meet someone passionate about their beliefs, even if you don’t share them.
You were being trained to be a compliant cog, someone who could mindlessly follow instructions as opposed to seeking out innovation and surprise
Yes we were. No one is asking anyone to disregard instructions, but it doesn’t mean we should follow them blindly. Just because the your boss receives something that is different from her point of view, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
The rest of the article is really good, and provides actionable tips on reinventing yourself, mostly using social media. Read it. And perhaps more importantly, put it into action. I know it’s something I’m going to be referring to every three months or so just to remind me that I shouldn’t be a cog in the machine.
At this point I want to congratulate my friend Ping from Pixel Pastry who arguably did not get brainwashed and has been unveiled as junior art director at Tribal DDB at the ripe old age of 23. Congrats!
[photo from Elsie Esq]
Tags: average, average people, average stuff, brainwashed, changethis, cogs, compliant cogs, compliant work, disregard instructions, fitting in, following instructions blindly, innovation, junior art director, mindlessly following instructions, passionate, pdf, personal branding, pigeon holes, pigeon-holed, pixel pastry, playing it safe, reliable living, seth godin, singaporean education system, social media, standing out, stressful education, tribal ddb
Posted in Gen Y, social media | No Comments »
Monday, January 18th, 2010
This isn’t new advice. I learned this just over a year ago from Keith Ferrazzi in his awesome book “Never Eat Alone“. And this doesn’t just apply to you as an individual when you need help with a problem, some advice, or in my case a job search – this applies to your organisation if you’re even thinking of engaging in social media.
Something that happens all too often is a company realises it has a new product launch coming up, doesn’t have bloggers to seed to (what a dirty word) and begins the “relationship” process at that point.
That’s too late.
If you do that, don’t be surprised that no “advocates” leap to the defense of your brand when a crisis happens and blame social media.
If you start a blog before you built relationships with other blogs and then get no traffic when you post something, don’t blame the blog.
If you want to push a press release and follow the “best practices” and tweet it at the magical hour on Friday afternoon but no one in your network retweets it because you never engaged with them, don’t blame Twitter.
You need to build that network and goodwill way in advance, so that when you need it, it’s there for you. If you’re thinking about building it because you need it – you’re already too late.
I’d love to hear from either side of the coin: great stories where you invested in a network/community and reaped the benefits or stories as a blogger/influencer where you knew the other party had its back against the wall and was grasping at straws to just get anyone possible for their press event/product launch. The comments are yours!
Tags: advice, advocates, best practices, blame social media, blog traffic, bloggers, build your network, community, engaging in social media, goodwill, grasping at straws, help with a problem, influencers, job search, keith ferrazzi, network, never eat alone, press event, press release, product launch, retweet, seeding bloggers, social media, tweet, twitter
Posted in blogger outreach, social media, social media business | 2 Comments »
Monday, January 11th, 2010
Earlier this week Brian from Happyesque dropped me a private message on Twitter asking me to send him a Tweet on what would make me happy in 2010.
I took a few days to think this over – should it be social media focused? Or something personal? Could I write something smart? After all the options are endless – Companies finally start to wake up to social media, being happy, Arsenal winning the Premier League, the final season of Lost being the best ever….
Then in the few short days I was thinking about it, barely a week into 2010 we have bloggers wasting company time and resources for a prank , angst over postbox publicity, the whole fiasco in Malaysia and buses carrying soccer players getting shot at and I just thought to myself “jeez this is how we’re starting the year?”
And with that my answer formed: I just want people to be kinder to each other, both online and offline. If we can do this and not start new wars this year, I think I’d be pretty happy.
Head on to Happyesque to check out the responses from Tweeters and Bloggers and share what would make YOU happy in 2010 in the comments.
Tags: 2010, arsenal, happiness, happy, happyesque, lost, postbox, social media, twitter
Posted in community | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Sometimes, being involved in socia media, it seems everyone is talking about the same thing and that it’s being amplified over many people and over time.
It’s even scarier if you’re an organisation and you wake up to see 10, 20, 50, 100 tweets about you one morning and rush to come up with some sort of response by the afternoon.
But how “sticky” really are these conversations – or are they actually rather transient?
Let’s look at two relatively “big” occurences this year: United Breaks Guitars and the JK Wedding Dance and their search trends on Google (click for larger image):
JK Wedding Dance - United Breaks Guitars
Though there was certainly a surge, they both lasted for about six weeks each and given that they happened at about the same time, it could have been possible to miss one or the other due to noise.
Let’s add in two more events: Kanye West at the VMAs and Google Wave’s launch.
Google Wave - Kanye West
Three immediate observations:
- Kanye’s search volume – while through the roof, is also shorter than any other story, lasting less than a month (looks like two weeks from the scale). And let’s face it, without the comment from President Obama, it would have been even shorter.
- Kanye’s search volume immediately dwarfs that of JK Wedding Dance and United Breaks Guitars – again this comes back to noise. How long can your story (positive or negative) hold the attention of the social media sphere?
- Google Wave doesn’t create a spike but does have the longest sustained interest over time – obviously good news for a product launch, bad news if this is a PR fiasco.
Finally, let’s add Tiger Woods to the fray:
Tiger Woods
It peaks as high as Kanye but has sustained itself pretty well. Bad news for Tiger – or any brand that finds itself in that unfortunate position.
So what’s the takeaway?
I generally wouldn’t encourage it, but there might be certain situations where it’s okay to keep quiet and not respond. Take Kanye for example. If he kept silent and didn’t go on numerous talk shows – it’d be over in a week or two. Erased (or at least embedded pretty deep) in our collective consciousness. To some extent same for Tiger. If another “Kanye” happened two days after Tiger, I think both stories would have fizzled out.
The social media eco system is fickle and riddled with attention-deficit disorder. Everyone want someone to bash but that could change from one day to the next. It’s easy to say that in retrospect of course, but the next time you get that feeling you absolutely need to reply or your company will lose millions – think about whether that story will really be around in two weeks, of if the pirahnas would have moved on to new meat.
Tags: amplification, google trends, google wave, jk wedding dance, kanye west VMA, social media, tiger woods, transient, tweets, united breaks guitars
Posted in case studies, social media, social media business | No Comments »
Friday, December 4th, 2009
Mark started the ball rolling with his 2010 predictions for social media, and now it’s my turn to weigh in on what I think are trends going forward and what that means, particularly for businesses engaged in (or thinking of engaging in) social media.
In no particular order, here we go:
1) Simultaneous fragmentation and consolidation
From blogging platforms (Typepad, Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal and now Posterous) to analytics platforms (Omniture, Web Trends, Google Analytics) to listening tools (Radian 6, TNS Cymfony, Techrigy, Brandtology) to social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, QQ) to search platforms (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Naver, Baidu), the choices that arise just to decide where to ‘play’ can be overwhelming.
Part of the social media sphere is that it’s inherently easy to set up these platforms at low costs and immediately compete with the big boys. As a business, have you done your due diligence to know where your target audience is and which platform works for you? Or are you really going to assume that Facebook solves all problems and use it to reach China (where Facebook is blocked)?
At the same time this fragmentation isn’t going to go on forever. We’ve seen Adobe acquiring Omniture and Facebook acquiring FriendFeed this year. The danger of investing in a platform that may have a very real chance of disappearing or swallowed up by another company in the next 12-24 months is real, so choices have to be thought through more carefully than ever.
2) Social media is becoming more exclusive
Private Facebook profiles, walled gardens like Google Wave and Twitter lists all make it even more challenging to reach the ever-elusive ‘influencer’. If someone has 2,000 friends on Facebook but his profile is private, you’ve lost a way to reach 2,000 people. Twitter lists are naturally exclusive but penetrating the right one could really help you. In-groups are forming and the later a company gets with the programme, the higher the barrier to entry. How high a barrier do you want to deal with?
3) Social media policies will be set in stone.
From the NFL to Honda to Dominos, companies are feeling the heat of not putting down hard guidelines to encourage employees to participate in social media, but to participate responsibly. Nothing is secret anymore and if businesses let employees run unchecked, it could spell big problem for the company.
4) Sentiment analysis will become increasingly important
More emphasis will be placed on sentiment analysis. Perhaps not necessarily the accuracy of it, but what can actually be done with the data. A free Google Alert can tell me everything I need to know about my brand, but can the sentiment analysis tools put data together in a way that makes cohesive sense? Can they understand native language nuances? Can they segment by country? Will the phrase “a terrific example of bad customer service” be recognised as positive or negative sentiment? As advancements in the language recognition software gets more advanced, these questions will have to be answered and listening will be more crucial than ever.
5) Mobile access points
To me, netbooks can fall in the category of ‘mobile’ these days, not just handphones. As access on the go becomes even more ubiquitous (at least in developed countries) are you ready for a proportion of your customers to be accessing your site or service online? Or are they going to be even more frustrated at the lack of usability (I’m looking at you, local cinemas)? Are you enhancing your services with the idea of mobility and flexibility, or are you still operating with the mindset that customers only think about your products and services when sitting at home, thus losing the opportunity to snag them when they may be walking right by your physical store?
6) Transparency and disclosure
Beaten over the head to death. Companies and agencies who don’t understand the idea of transparency and disclosure aren’t going to last very long. On a personal note, I think bloggers who get into pay-per-post kind of schemes are doing themselves a disservice and there needs to be a better way for bloggers and companies to work together.
Bonus: Singapore special – Blogger outreach has to change.
Speaking purely as a blogger, I’m really frustrated, no I’m more than frustrated, I’m sick and tired of agencies reaching out to me for events, products and services which are so far from something that I might be interesting that it really grinds my gears. Agencies need to learn this is as cardinal a sin as pitching the technology editor a piece of fashion news (and I don’t mean tech-news with a bit of fashion in it).
The way of doing outreach aside, the events themselves have to change. This one off ‘come to my event and touch my product and read my press release’ has to change. And bloggers need to make it known that they’re tired of it by not going, rather then going for the sake of being invited to the next one.
So there you go. Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.
[this was originally a post on Digiramblings, a shared blog by four Gen Y agency folk in Singapore trying to make sense of digital and social media
Tags: 2010, asia, predictions, Singapore, social media, trends
Posted in social media | 3 Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
This is a really late post but I’ve completed my probation period at BLUE and am now a full-fledged, confirmed full-time employee of the company.
Needless to say, I’m pretty happy about this because I think BLUE is a great place to start my career and the analytical, structured nature of the firm is exactly what I need to nurture the left side of my brain. Not that I’m illogical by any means, but being in an enironment where I’m forced to think through things step by step and get to the point in a concise manner is good training for me. Especially coming from a school like SMU that has the tendency to reward fluff.
For the past three and a half months I’ve been straddling a 50% search engine optimisation (SEO) role and 50% social media. I’m really finding this to be a great match because having lived in the ’social media’ world for the last 1.5 years before employment, I didn’t know much about the SEO side of things. Now that I’ve been exposed to it, I think the two are very natural marriage partners and being able to combine both is definitely a big big strength that I have developed. I’ve applied the SEO stuff I’ve picked up at work to my own blog and I’ve already begun to see results, and that’s very fulfilling.
On the social media side I’ve had the opportunity to be exposed to some pretty nifty tools for listening and having access to all these real world data that I would never dream of having with just my blog. Seeing a Google Analytics account with traffic and data in the thousands was really a big eye-opener for me. I’m really proud of getting the BLUE blog up and running, as well as managing all fifteen of our social media presences. I’ve had to put together documents for internal “training” and again I’m finding it really useful to take what I know and delivering it in a way that is easily digestible to someone who might have little to no knowledge of social media.
What I’m liking most is the way work is handled. When projects come in I’m generally left to my own devices (after some initial training for SEO), but when I hit a brickwall, there’s always support of the people I’m working with to help me break through the wall. As far as mentoring goes I find this has been a nice balance because I can spend a couple of hours knocking a problem around, but yet know I have ready feedback to tell me if I’m knocking it around in the right way or not.
Thanks to everyone who’s been supportive of me getting a job at BLUE and I hope to have more stuff to share as my working life develops in the months and years to come.
Tags: blue, mentoring, projects, SEO, social media
Posted in SEO, Work, social media | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
Yesterday I talked about how there is a misconception that certain industries are more suited for social media and how in fact anyone can use the tools available to contribute to their niche, especially when they’re ramping up their job hunting efforts.
As promised, here are three things you can do to get started:
1) Write on Facebook
I know a couple of people who do this. They write spiffy notes, or thoughtful notes about current issues and then tag people relevant to encourage replies and a conversation. This serves the dual purpose of getting your thoughts out there and also getting valuable feedback. What if a HR student wrote a note about a more effective reward/compensation for Generation Y in the office? Or a finance student demonstrated his ability to explain the financial crisis in non-jargon terms?
2) Use Twitter
You can do this without even having a Twitter account. Use Twitter Search and enter phrases that are relevant to your field. Search for “javascript” if you’re a programmer, “branding” if you want to do branding or relevant hashtags like #analytics for web analytics. Soon you’ll get a feel of what people are talking about as well as the links they share, and you’ll be ready to create your own Twitter account and add to the discussion too.
3) Join a group on LinkedIn
There’s literally a group for anything on LinkedIn. Some a more active than others but there is probably an existing group out there. Try asking questions like “what would you look for when you’re hiring a fresh graduate in the [insert profession] field?”. The likelihood is someone will reply and you’ll be gathering valuable information straight from future employers.
The market is competitve and everyone needs a way to stand out. Try one (or all) of these ideas and bring a printout of that Facebook discussion (and the comments) to your next interview. Talk about the latest topic on Twitter that was mentioned an hour before your interview. Ask for your interviewer’s views on a topic commonly brought up in your LinkedIn group and ask how that company approaches these questions.
All these small things convey a message about you: That you’re passionate about your field, that you’re keeping a finger on the pulse on what’s going on, and that you’re not afraid to use technology to do it.
Don’t underestimate these qualities in today’s workforce – they can be priceless.
Tags: employers, facebook, fresh graduates, HR, LinkedIn, social media, twitter
Posted in social media | 4 Comments »
