Connecting to consumers through social media

I am beginning to feel Twitter fatigue. I was incredibly active on it when I started, which was just a few months ago, but now don’t do much more than a cursory check once a day or so to see if anything interesting is floating around. Twitter used to be much more about links to interesting articles or even blog posts being bandied about, in addition to the usual status messages. That’s what drew me to it. Now, I feel it is more about conversations between individuals and status messages than the information I found so useful. And Twitter’s continuing technical issues aren’t helping either. I’ve been patient for a while because I understand that any website can have technical issues and things need to be sorted out, but it seems to be taking a much longer time than necessary.

Anyway, I wanted to explore the uses of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, by companies and brands as a method of influencing consumers, which apart from link publicity (which sometimes counts as spam) is easily the best way of employing social media usefully. Jo pointed me to a useful blog post by Jeremiah Owyang that aggregates some examples of companies using Twitter in this way.

What’s important with what these companies are doing is that they are listening to their consumers/users and responding to them. The single most important thing for any consumer is to know that their opinion counts. If you ask me, every business in the world should have a mechanism like Twitter where people can contact the company with queries and be assured of a response from a human-being, and not an automated response like we usually receive by email. Ernst & Young, for example, has one individual responding to all queries that prospective graduate recruits have about working there on their Facebook group.

This video, an interview of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research speaking about the influence of social media marketing, is very informative and relevant to this topic.

June 27, 2008 | Filed Under Anjali Ramachandran | 3 Comments 

Pop goes that bubble, but it is not social media

This file was first taken by (and then released to wikpedia by) kayokayo.

Image via Wikipedia

There is a toing-and-froong going on over at Mashable today about metrics.

This is a familiar story now.  Some people, Drama 2.0 being one, equate ROI with immediate numbers.  Get me page numbers, etc.  Others, are looking for an amplification factor or an qualitative outcome.

In his rebuttal, Drama 2.0, uses the example of having a beach front property in St Kitts.  If you try to sell a beach front property without being able to point to it, people will call you as an imposter.

Well as I know St Kitts (anyone want to move there?), I wouldn’t bother with the owning the beach front property.  I would just connect you up with people in St Kitts.

I don’t have to set up an office and get people to list their properties publicly and make a general display of themselves.  I would just patch you in to the St Kitts community.  They’ll tell you what’s for sale, show you the properties discreetly, tell you the rules about residency, and how long the paperwork will take, and so on.  They’ll also help you decide whether you will enjoy living there and help you build relationships so that living there is enjoyable.

This is why “bolting” on SM in a manipulative way could be a large mistake.  You build up your big fancy website?  What is the “barrier to entry” for anyone like me from using your website to enhance my network?

I can use yours because it is based on “things”.  You can’t use mine, because mine is based on people.  And god help me if my friends found out I took money to introduce you to them.  That’s called pimping last time I looked.  I do that once, just once, and I am over, so-over!

The game has changed folks.  You didn’t really have exclusive access to a property in St Kitts that we all want desperately.  That was just an illusion (who wants to live on island without friends anyway?).

The illusion has been blown out of the water.

What can we do?

So what use are negative messages?  None in my opinion.  I don’t help you be telling you what you can’t do.  So what can we do?

a) I can organize a site for people in St Kitts (their orphanage needs some help BTW)

b) I can think hard what value they will get (its a small place - they might get more value from connections off the island than inside it)

c) I can think about why they might be bothered with strangers.

If I can’t phrase what I am doing in human terms, all that IT is going to be down the plug, anyway.  The opportunity of social media is saving costs, but not for greater manipulation.  The opportunity is for saving costs of something that used to be really, really, really expensive : building relationships.

Social media allows you to move from a transactional, easy to copy but capital intensive business based on owning and protecting the ownership of expensive things

- to -

a relationship-based business where some financial capital is replaced with reputational capital.

And you don’t have a choice.  Because if you don’t move, other people will do it.  And you will be left holding the parcel - like that house you paid too much for (sorry! ! have other disasters in my life).

Social media is bursting the bubble of overpriced assets and pretentious claims to exclusivity.

Zemanta Pixie
June 27, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | 2 Comments 

Whats the buzz?

I don’t know anything about social media apart from visiting some mediacamps.

I don’t have a website and I have never blogged in my life. Yeah can you imagine!!!

My academic background is mainly sociology but I wouldn’t call myself a sociologist in the pure sense. I have a PhD on hold and so it has been for a couple of years. My main professional career has been consultancy in project management. I am also a sound engineer and musician on a semi-professional level.

I am on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Secondlife etc. but I never use them. I can’t find the point to use them. I have been surfing around last week to check so-called social media freaks sites. They have a new blog almost every day but do I find any comments on their blogs?  No, not very often.

Are all this people sitting and writing stuff for themselves?

I went past an Internet cafe the other day and saw about a hundred people sitting in nice aligned rows silent checking, writing in their so-called “social networks”.

Shouldn’t it be called asocial media or anti-social media?

Don’t get me wrong. I am interested to plug in to this “world”.

What have missed?

What is the big news everybody is yelling about in these communities or on their blogs?

Has really something changed since the quote from Frank Zappa?

“The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows”.

Please give me comments on this one. I want to hear your thoughts around it. If you can explain to me and get me on the boat we could probably get a lot of more people on board.

Ok now I have to go and feed my goldfish (maybe I should write that on Twitter so everybody knows…).

June 27, 2008 | Filed Under Kristian Eliasson | 6 Comments