What to do when your social media is frustrating you

We’ve all done it. We’ve been so frustrated by the lack of traditional response to our social media activity, we’ve gone back to our old ways.

• We’ve written what we thought was the best-blog-post-ever and then no one read it.
• We’ve encouraged someone to follow us on Twitter. When they didn’t, we emailed them directly.
• We’ve made the most intelligent comment on a celebrity blog and the following 100 comments entirely ignore our stream of thought.
• Worse still, the original high-profile author acknowledges specific people for their comments except you.
• We use social media as a vehicle to blast out traditional marketing messages at work.

But

You cannot broadcast.

You cannot push.

You can only talk to your community when you have built one up.

So here are tips for what to do when your social media is frustrating you

1. Don’t worry. We’ve all been there before. Your community will be forgiving for any one-off breaks in etiquette. If isn’t forgiving, it’s not worth having.
2. Do something else for a while. You cannot become an expert in all of social media at one time. Instead, focus on one or two activities for a while, then move on to some others, then come back to the first. You will find how much better you are after a break.
3. Do something for someone else. Have you ever reTweeted one of your follower’s Tweets? Have you ever pushed a link to another post other than your own? Have you helped explain something as simple as an RSS feed to a newcomer? Have you asked someone to guest post on your blog? You can only begin to expect back when you have given a lot.
4. Do nothing. The web and the blogosphere are noisy places. But what is louder than a shout? A whisper.

Photo credit: misocrazy

What social media can learn from the Byzantine Empire

When the rulers of western Europe arrived at the court of the 10th century Byzantine emperors, they left in awe.

Magic or just beyond comprehension

Their route to the emperors led them past a brass tree filled with metal birds which sang. They edged their way gingerly beside mechanical lions whose tails moved from side to side. And when they arrived before the emperor himself, he sat on a throne that appeared to rise and descend as the audience progressed.

The westerners came from countries that had not seen hot, running water since the end of the Roman Empire. Five centuries of distruction and poverty meant that there was no living memory of the comforts or technology that an earlier civilisation had achieved.

The Eastern emperors, meanwhile, lived in a society that had survived largely intact since the end of Rome. They lived in ancient palaces, built by the Romans centuries earlier, where the technology still functioned.

To the westerners, the technology was little more than magic. But the reality was that the Byzantine emperors had no idea how the apparently magical trees, animals or thrones had been built. That had long been forgotten. They only knew how to operate what they had inherited.

So what is the link between social media and the Byzantine Empire?

I think of this story a lot at the moment.

As great waves of people begin to use social media, they will achieve awesome feats, not because they build, maintain or even understand it, but because they know how to operate it.

And we early adopters will need to work out what we will do then.

Photo credit: Larry & Flo

It’s a myth that social media suffers from a lack of accountability or ROI

Most social mediators have finished the year fearful, often justified, that social media suffers from a lack of accountability or ROI (return on investment). 

Their concerns are matched by more traditional players, companies and individuals who have come late to social media.

They see the fun. But where’s the process?  Where’s the strategy? Where’s the money?

Warning! Warning! Warning!

We are all in danger of putting people off before we have really got started.

I think everyone should just calm down. They are missing a point.

Early-adopter social mediators and the difficult-to-persuade are misreading the excitement of the active late-comers.

Yes, the latter are thrilled to set up a Twitter account or kick off a blog without so much as a who-is-it-for or a why-are-we-doing-this. 

The resultant half-born profiles and scatter-gun postings lie shivering and neglected all around us. But at least they got going.

Give them a break.

Let them set up this and neglect that. And then let them begin to work out who they really want to follow and by whom they really want to be followed. They are only going to understand such words once they have got got involved.

The solution to the problem

The irony is that these excited, active, latecomers to social media are the solution to all our problems.

They are not in this social media buzz because of the kit or technology.

They are there because they have always been good at media. Social media is just the next thing. So

• (Once) Traditional marketers will come up with the best strategies for embracing social media.
• (Once) Traditional journalists who wrote for specific communities will write the best blogs. 
• (Once) Traditional editors with great networking skills will set up and garden great social networks.
• (Once) Traditional PRs will monitor the conversation better than anyone else.
• (Once) Traditional sales people will spot the opportunities for revenue.
• (Once) Traditional event organisers will work out how to sell tickets with it.

I am not naive. I know it is harder than that.

But, don’t  imagine that the long-honed skills of process, procedural driven people are suddenly going to be lost in the excitement of social media – that marketers no longer market, or sales no longer sell, or journalists no longer write. That just makes out social media to be more than it is.  

Photo credit: Oddsock

Make sure none of your brand’s future social media profiles can be stolen

Do you remember when you were about to launch a new website for a magazine/exhibition/product?

You found it easy to name because you just took the existing brand and dotcommed it. Then you discovered that the name had already been pinched by a “company”. Your only resort was to add some meaningless phrase to the brand so as to avoid the expense or time to get your name back. You’re still annoyed five years later as all your brand-centred SEO is so awkward. 

That was then, what about now?

Now you are planning your brand’s social media strategy. You decide to launch a LinkedIn group, after research of your users, winning over your colleagues and organising resources. You go to set up the group and, goddammit, find that the name you wanted is already in use.  Worse still, you find that some of the key thought-leaders in your sector have already signed up to the group thinking it was you.

You don’t have much recourse. You cannot complain to LinkedIn unless it is your exact brand which has been replicated. Even then, have you actually tried to contact some of the social media providers? And, were you to be successful, are you really going to contact those covetted members and say they joined the wrong group?

Just one resolution

If you are going to make one New Year resolution, you might make it this – sign up your brand now to as many potential social media sites as possible (and make a record of the passwords!). You might never use the vast majority of them. But make sure none of your brand’s future social media profiles can be stolen.

Photo credit: Richt

Are early adopters in social media ready for competition from a new wave of competitors?

They will compete with us to dominate social media. And they will do so because their chosen subject is more focused than us. Who are they and are we ready for them?

They are, of course, people in non-digital jobs turning to social media for the first time in their lives. Not early adopters like you and me, using Twitter, FriendFeed, Vimeo or whatever, in a constantly analytical, experimental way. No, these lot could not care less how it  operates or what it is called. They just want it to work for them.    

I’ve already asked whether bloggers are ready for competiton from the arrival of so many former, print journalists who, having lost their jobs or their prejudices, will turn to blogging and better many long-term bloggers. And so with this new wave of people using social media to network.

Take my brother, head of media and campaigns in a government department. He’s already reactivated his Facebook profile, set up a Twitter account and launched a LinkedIn group, all in two weeks. His years of media, many on the UK’s national papers, translates seamlessly to our new world. But he has one further bonus when it comes to community – his focus. So when he sets up his LinkedIn group he does not just want any communications experts, only those in local government. 

He’s already having debates about whether Facebook has a role in a company’s internal communication.

How many of we early adopters can beat that?

Five ways Twitter can help you to develop skills to cultivate a community

Just as the reasons to be interested in Facebook once more are how it teaches you the basic skills of social networking, so Twitter can become your primer for understanding what exactly is a community and how to garden it.

My moment of clarity came about after a conference we recently ran called the Future of Social Media. Several people, mostly social media marketers, began to follow me on Twitter and I realised just how easy it was to develop a little community. But I had to work out the focus of my community first, in my case social media marketers, PRs and journalists, then a little savagery, plucking out as many of my existing communty who did not fit the bill as possible, and then kicking off a programme of regular and useful Tweets far removed from the “On the bus home” stuff I started with.

I wish I had been as focused with this blog but it is written primarily for my colleagues in a global B2B exhibition and magazine company covering 15 different business sectors and boasting at least three different roles. No chance there, then! Twitter, meanwhile, has provided me with the experience of focusing on, cultivating and now expanding a community that I had not gained with the blog.  Here are my tips.

1. Follow people who have attended a face-to-face event with you. It is blindingly obvious. Go to a conference, find out the Twitter hashtag that was used, go to Twitter Search after the event, see who exactly was there or following the event from on the outside. Many of those, through self-selection, will be exactly the type of people you see as part of your community – they are interested in exactly the same event as you, they are already on Twitter so have taken the first steps into social media, you can even see whether they think like you from their Tweets.
2. Do not be afraid not to follow people, to stop following them or even block them. At this stage, I want to know who is in my growing community, I want to be certain that they operate within its core subject matter, I want my list to be clean, crisp and active. So, don’t immediately follow those who follow you. Wait and see what they have to offer. Do they bring anything to your conversation? Do they understand the etiquette? Are they even active? If they fulfil none of these criteria, don’t follow them. If they drop you before you have made your decision, they weren’t worth following. Why not go further and regular weed out those who have little to offer. Or even block some.
3. Your community will never grow because of the stars only because of the up-and-comings. Inevitably, you will kick off your community by following some of the high profile social media gurus, as you jolly well should. They will lead you into the most extraordinary areas – they, after all, are gardening their vast community by being useful to you. But also notice some of those who have no profile (as yet), who occasionally overstep the mark between the private and professional but always exude great enthusiasm. They might not introduce you to ideas and concepts as frequently as the stars but what they do bring to you is a freshness and uniqueness that becomes sacred over time.
4. Keep active, keep creative and keep collaborative. Twitter is like Christmas – so much more fun to recommend and help someone else, than to be recommended or helped yourself. As you get to know you little community, try and push the content around so that A gets to know B and C gets to know D. But you are going to have to be mightily attentive to achieve this, swiftly responding to Tweets and thinking of ways to keep people interested in eachother. 
5. Understand the difference between regular Tweets, @replies and directs as soon as possible. For pity sake! Otherwise, like I have done far too often, you will embarass yourself far too easily.

Five reasons to be interested in Facebook once more

It comes in waves. One day I am obsessed with Twitter. Another day it is back to FriendFeed. But, at the moment, it’s Facebook. I’ll try and tell you why.

Only a few months ago, I was asking on this blog what is the point of Facebook. I even asked a colleague to come and show me what turned her on. But to no avail. The interface was too busy. The pages did not make sense. Who were all these “friends”, anyway? And then…

And then, I began to get it. Here are my reasons.

1. If you are new to social media, Facebook is a good way to get up to speed. Imagine yourself a social media virgin, once more, and forced to kick off with FriendFeed. I don’t think so! 
2. Are you fearful of the divide between your professional and private life?  There is no quicker way to learn this division than through Facebook – just take a look at your “friends’” profiles and work out what you wouldn’t put up.
3. If you don’t join Facebook, you cannot compare it to LinkedIn. Some might be really LinkedIn. Some might be rather more Facebook. Do you know which one is suitable? If you cannot compare the two, you are not going to learn which network is right for your community.
4. Sign up to and play one of the games. No, it is not puerile. If you have never experienced a viral game this is your chance to do what spotty teenagers in Arizona are brought up on.
5. Can you encourage your ”friends” to join a group to which you can sensitively market them something? Many of my “friends” work in the travel industry - I used to be editor of a weekly newspaper for the travel industry. You might well be in a similar situation where your group is dominated by one type of worker. Is there a way to create a more professional group activity – I call this the “Trojan Horse”.

Are you still enjoying Facebook? Or are you really turned on by another social media activity?

Is it time to stop using the phrase “social media”?

Their eyes cloud over. Then there’s a nervous little laugh. Damn, I’ve lost them. It’s that phrase social media again, turning civilised human beings into twitching wrecks.

They cannot escape its constant repetition at work where their email inboxes are filled with conferences on the subject. They cannot even escape it at home where their loved ones tease them about an activity they’ve known only for mooning teenagers. They all know it is absurdly important but can they have a break, please?

So my New Month resolution is this. Stop using the phrase. Just talk about the benefits. You want to

• hear what is being said about your product or your business sector? 
• see what your communities are thinking?
• find out what your thought leaders are considering?
• join in that debate and give a response?
• find low-cost solutions to previously costly new build?

There, I did it. And not a social media in sight. Just good, old, honest media!

Are bloggers ready for the competition from the arrival of so many former, print journalists?

Do bloggers realise quite what is about to hit them? 

Following wave after wave of redundancies on US and UK  newspapers and a marked shift to web-only or web-dominant on those titles that survive, hundreds of traditional journalists are about to flood the bloggers hallowed grounds. Once there, journalists will kick off blogs, competing for stories, attention and readers, rubbing up against exactly the group they have sometimes blames for much of traditional journalism’s malaise.

Are bloggers, and to be honest many New Media journalists, ready for this new wave of economic migrants? Will bloggers need to raise their game? Is the world big enough for both of them?

Bloggers will spot the newcomers easily at first. They will continue to operate in the same familiar and trusted ways that they are used to in print, presuming that those ways need only be transfered to the web. So notice how many of the blogs will be “broadcast” at first, written as if they are newspaper columns and expecting readers to come to them.

Are bloggers ready for what comes next, however? Bloggers have broken some great stories over the years but a new wave of professional journalists oozing great contacts and forced to use their blogs to break stories are going to be tough new competition. Are bloggers going to be just a little annoyed that the newcomers, with their strong links back to what remains of traditional media, will have their postings picked up and linked to major websites far quicker than theirs? Will the years of training to write quick, factually correct and legal articles translate into a new standard of accuracy and attribution which will fundamentally alter the content of blogs?

But could there be a different scenario? Could the new wave of people into New Media raise everyone’s game? Could it not bring new names to the fore, new ideas, new ways of creating blogs? After all, some of the greatest bloggers today started out as print journalists, Jeff Jarvis and Craig Stolz for example. WIll not the newcomers morph into New Media stars just as effortlessly?

The constant drip, drip, drip of bad news about print media has made us all think of the negative results of these seismic changes. The arrival of these journalists will bring a little wounded pride to those bloggers who have been toiling for years.  But, for any blogger of worth, the newcomers bring nothing but good.

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Three easy ways to find blogs about your chosen subject when starting from scratch

I am often asked the same question by people who are about to start writing a blog. “Where do I start to find blogs about my chosen subject?” In answer to the question, here are three easy steps. What are you suggestions?

1. Absolutely the first step is Addictomatic. You simply type in a word or phrase and it spews back every mention of such content on a Twitter, blog, YouTube….It is endlessly fascinating.
2. Just get reading. Use a blog aggregator like Technorati to refine your search or preferably Alltop.com, as suggested by CeCe SolomonLee in comments below. I used to spend long Sunday mornings lost in the Sunday Times and holidays lost in the latest Booker Prize winning novel. Now I spend every moment skipping like a stone form one blog to another, endlessly fascinated by what I find, endlessly learning, signing up for RRS feeds and email subscriptions.
3. Sign up to Twitter and look for people in the sector you are interested in. Start following them – don’t worry whether they follow you, that’s for later – and click through on their tinyurls to the articles, postings and pictures they are spewing out.

I am glad people ask the question where to find blogs, to be honest. I bang on and on that the key act of blogging is going out and commenting on what is being said. Just by asking the question, it suggests that the people are stepping right over the old-fashioned style of “broadcast” blogging (stick it up and EXPECT people to come to it) and starting out afresh with “social media” blogging (get involved with the conversation and pull readers in).