Category: Social media

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DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS

Don't make the wrong kind of impression

CONFESSION TIME…

  1. I got drunk as a teenager;
  2. Inhaled (unlike Bill Clinton) and;
  3. Ran naked along the seafront in Bracklesham Bay (actually it may have been Selsey Bill, it’s just that I can’t remember – see points 1 & 2).

Thing is you’ll have to take my word for it. Because no evidence exists. No fuzzy photos. No shaky home movies. Only memories dulled by the passage of time. Unlike the teenagers and twenty-somethings of today, whose every move is captured on mobile phone cameras and posted for posterity to Facebook et al where the images will remain as pin sharp as the day they were taken for ever more (or certainly for a very long time).

Now naturally I didn’t mention points 1, 2 and 3 when I applied for a job as a cub reporter on the Reading Chronicle. Nor did I bring up my murky past when, a few years later, I started working for the BBC. But that’s not the way it works these days. Our reputations precede us like never before.

I was reminded of this by a friend of my son who works in the City. Discussing the potential for blotting our proverbial copybooks by what we post to the social web, he told me that the very first thing he does when presented with a long list of wannabe high-flyers applying for a job at his bank is to search for them on Facebook. If there’s even a hint of excess on their timeline – boozy weekends, recreational drug use, a potentially bone-breaking passion for adventure sports –  they don’t make the short list. “Too much trouble on a Monday morning,” as he put it and added: “Too keen to leave on a Friday night.” And my son’s friend isn’t the only one using the social web as a crude filter. Recruitment agencies do the same thing. A don’t kid yourself they only look at the highly-polished versions of us we post to LinkedIn. Let’s face it we all do something similar with new contacts and old acquaintances. Call it due diligence or stalking. Amounts to the same thing.

So where does all this leave today’s jobseekers? Well, potentially in the mire. I’ve just delivered a series of social media workshops at Lancaster University designed to get students thinking about their online presence and how it could impact – both positively and negatively – on their chances of entering the big, wide world of work. Delegates were a mix of domestic and overseas undergraduates and, whilst the numbers were too small a chunk of the total student population to be representative, I was struck by the difference between the two groups. A social media “audit” revealed that the overseas students were much more careful about what they posted and the privacy settings they used when they posted. And the overseas students remarked at how surprised they’d been as freshers at the relatively laissez faire attitude UK students had to posting. I’m not yet sure whether the “let it all hang out” approach of my fellow Brits is cultural (I suspect it might be) or whether social media awareness is better taught in schools in Europe, the Far East and elsewhere. Or perhaps it has something to do with the bigger investment (and, therefore, greater risk aversion) overseas students have with their even higher student fees.

Whatever the reason we all have something to learn: why weigh ourselves down with unnecessary baggage?  Or as I might have said back in the day but didn’t “what happens in Bracklesham stays in Bracklesham.” I used a clunky visual metaphor to make my point. Loaded two identical rucksacks – one with bouquets, the other with the brickbats below

Social media brickbats - don't weigh yourself down

and asked two equally-qualified students to put them on and make a dash for the “finishing line” (employment, I said it was clunky!). You don’t need me to tell you who won.

I’m not saying avoid doing 1, 2 and 3. After all I didn’t. And people in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones. As I did once in a state of undress whilst vaulting the back garden fences of De Beauvoir Road, Reading. But then that’s another story… I’m just saying think about the consequences of posting the evidence.

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UP PERISCOPE

A quick look at PERISCOPE – one of the new(ish) kids on the social media block

In a sentence or two…
“The closest thing to teleportation,” according to one of its founders. Stream live video from your smartphone or tablet. Followers can watch in real time or (thanks to the app’s automatic recording facility) up to 24 hours later “as live” (e.g. as it happened with no editing).

Good for…
Organisations with a strong  and, ideally, dynamic (that is, moving) visual element likely to capture an audience. So, for example, the Zoological Society of London uses Periscope to stream videos of scary spiders and cute creatures at London Zoo. And  BBC Radio’s Test Match Special has used it to go behind the scenes at Lords during the second Ashes test (about which the less said the better from an English perspective)!

Bad for…
Lifting the veil on things that really should stay covered like naked flesh and cocaine snorting (or so I’m reliably informed)!

Five ways to use Periscope…
  1. Take viewers behind the scenes and show them a bit of your organisation they haven’t seen before.
  2. Identify in-house experts and get them to do a series of short (5′ maximum) how to sessions.
  3. Harness the power of story-telling by asking your colleagues, customers or service users to tell their own personal stories of your organisation and how it’s helped/affected them.
  4. Do a series of interviews with people in your organisation making sure it’s not just with the usual suspects such as the chief executive or senior managers.
  5. Stream live events that your hosting so that those who can’t make it to the actual venue can share in what’s going on.
Dos and don’ts…
  • Don’t push your brand, product or service too hard.
  • Don’t be too formal.
  • Do be guided by your audience. Let them ask questions – they pop up on your screen as text during your broadcast – and respond accordingly. Make them feel it’s there show not yours.
  • Don’t give up too soon. It takes a while to build an audience.
  • Do invest in a tripod if you’re doing lots of talking head stuff. But don’t leave the camera/phone static for too long. And buy a microphone with a fluffy cover to reduce distracting wind noise if you’re streaming outdoors.
  • Do keep your streams short, sharp and to the point.  Your “shows” should be episodic and each one leave the audience wanting more.
  • Do share a link to your stream on Twitter to maximise your potential audience.
  • Do bear in mind that, even more than other social media, timing is going to be of the essence. Schedule a live stream while your target audience is fast asleep or hard at work and you’re not going to get much from it.
  • Don’t forget that Periscope deletes your video automatically after 24 hours and that if you want to keep it for posterity you must choose the option to save it to your camera roll.
  • Don’t worry if you stuff up your live broadcast (I made a career of it at the BBC). To err is human. And in any case Periscope allows you to delete the recording of your stream straight away if you’re really embarrassed by it.
  • Do bear in mind it is live and that while you might get away with swearing or other inappropriate behaviour in a way you wouldn’t on prime time television, your audience, however small, may not be impressed.
  • Do analyse the keys stats ((provided by Perisocope – number of live views number of record views etc) and be guided by them.
Demographics…
Like almost all newly-launched social media networks the early adopters tend to be young, tech-savvy Americans. Accurate user numbers are hard to establish but owners, Twitter (who were so impressed with Periscope’s potential they bought it before it launched in February 2015), claim a million people signed up in the first 10 days. But I wouldn’t be overly concerned about these demographic issues. What’s exciting is that you’ve got the chance to use Periscope to the benefit of your organisation now and help shape its and your future.

Alternatives…
  • Meerkat – same principle but despite a head start on Periscope likely to fall behind without the clout of Twitter behind it.
  • Instagram and Vine – both allow users to record short videos to share with their followers but only after the event.
  • Skype – limits 25 people to group calls so more of a narrowcast than a broadcast.
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Know thine audience

In any kind of communication the more we know about our audience the better. Whether we’re writing for the web or for a flyer tucked under a windscreen wiper, this knowledge gives us clues about how to engage our readers, viewers and listeners. Engagement is a necessary precursor to understanding. Without engagement what we’re saying may only register as a sound tapping on the audience’s ear drums. We need to engage to get the message beyond the level of mere noise and up the neural pathways into the brain where it can be processed and understood and, all being well, acted upon.

But knowing the audience doesn’t just give us clues about content that might engage. It also helps us structure that content – put it in the most compelling order. It helps us determine the best style to apply to that content – serious or silly or somewhere in between. And it gives us useful information about the length of that content, the media we use to convey it, the places we put it and the time we put it there.

If we don’t think enough about the end users of the content we’re creating we risk ending up writing for the person we know best (ourselves) and getting it spectacularly wrong for everyone else. What I find funny may offend you and vice versa.

Grab a blank sheet of paper (very old school I realise but quicker, more flexible, and cheaper than using a sketching app like iDraw). In the middle draw the outline of a face, give the face a name and make this person representative of one of your target audiences. Let’s call him Bob. Around Bob’s face, spider diagram-style, jot down all the characteristics you think might be relevant. You’ll be scribbling obvious things like gender, age and race, and less obvious things like which social groups he belongs to, his hobbies and interests, his tastes in everything from music to food, his media habits – which papers he buys, which tv and radio programmes he likes, which websites he visits and yes, of course, which social media platforms he uses.

You also need to consider things like how much your version of Bob or Nadia knows already, how motivated they are to behave as you wish, and what mood they’re in. Knowing these things will help you understand where they are intellectually. Where they are physically in terms of time and space will also be informative. Are they on the bus, at their desk or in their armchair? Is it morning, noon or night? And are they in a hurry or on the slow train?

Let me give you a real rather than virtual world example. One January day I was filling my van with diesel and, as the display raced towards £100, feeling the metaphorical chill wind of fuel price inflation as well as the literal wind of winter. So time: in a hurry. Place: garage forecourt. Weather conditions: cold. Mood: bad. Armed with this broad brushstroke portrait of Richard, Worcester Bosch was able to target an advert for its energy efficient central heating boilers on the pump trigger. It couldn’t say much – because both time and space were in short supply – but it said enough to get me to Google the company name when I got home. And now what’s sitting in the corner of my kitchen? Yes, you’ve guessed, an energy efficient boiler! The same ad placed, say, on the locker door in my local gym would be less effective. I’d likely be hot and in a much better mood and consequently much less receptive to the implicit key message: buy our boiler.

Drawing a series of detailed pen portraits – one for each distinct target audience – takes some time. But it’s time well spent because like Worcester Bosch (the company’s not paying me, honest) it informs all the subsequent steps we take in the social media and ultimately leads to a much better return on investment.

This demographic information as marketeers call it can be gleaned from a range of sources. Some of it frankly is instinctive because we are like the people we’re targeting and knowing ourselves is knowing our audience. Or perhaps we know people – family or friends – who are like our target audiences. If I’m targeting children specifically then I’d do well to look at my own children to guide my approach.

Young people are particularly challenging to engage through the social media. Not least because as children of the Internet age they are more adept at the technology than older people but also because behaviourally they’re still developing and this means their vocabulary, idiom, interests and even choice of social networks can change faster than you can say Pinterest.

If like me you’re no longer a card carrying member of the hip cool generation then a brilliant way of keeping up with your target audience is simply to observe them. Become a social media anthropologist. A latter day Desmond Morris if you will sitting by the Facebook watering hole watching the young lion cubs at play. It sounds a bit creepy I know. And when the cubs you’re observing are your own it’s called Facebook stalking. I’ve heard grown ups describe Facebook as a third parent, going to places that real flesh and blood parents couldn’t possibly go to keep an eye on their children. I’ll let you decide whether going this far is too far. But there’s no doubt watching the online behaviour of our customers and prospective customers (and competitors for that matter) is a legitimate business practice. It’s called market research and it predates the social web by a long, long time.

Now it’s way beyond the brief of this article (or the workshop manual it originally appeared in) to explore market research except insofar as it touches upon social media strategy. And to that extent all we really need to know is that market research is, at its most basic, asking questions and listening to the answers and then using those answers to inform marketing decisions.

So we need to ask questions of our social media targets, listen to the answers and let those answers inform our social media decisions.

Asking questions of our target audiences helps us to get to know them so well they can, metaphorically speaking, sit on our shoulders as we create our online content and act as our critical friends. We should be asking these imaginary individuals what they think of what we’re about to post. Do they like it? If the answer’s no then why don’t they like it, what don’t they like about it, how could it be improved? Have an imaginary conversation with the imaginary Bob before you start the real conversation with the real Bob.

One other point on market research. You need to ask what questions people are asking. Questions about questions in other words. These question questions are important to ask because of the way people use the social web. In essence we type questions into search engines (even if we don’t actually hit the ? key) and then rely on those search engines to find us the answers – the more relevant the better. If I’m thinking about buying a camera I might type “digital SLR vs rangefinder” or “Canon vs Nikon.” If I’m worried about that pain in the pit of my tummy I might type “stomach cancer symptoms.” (Don’t worry about me by the way, turned out I was just hungry)!

It’s not just the questions they’re typing into Google we should be interested in. What questions are they asking and what comments are they posting across the social web, on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook? Maybe we’re in a good position to answer those questions for them, to add our own comments to theirs. What happens then is that our reputational stock rises – perhaps in one spurt so that they buy that slinky new Nikon camera there and then or perhaps by only a dribble but enough for them to return to us as a trusted source of information, refer others our way and maybe one day make that purchase, donate to our charity or get that lump checked out. And even if they don’t ever buy anything themselves they’re nonetheless leaving behind something valuable – a link, direct or indirect, back to you. Fantastic if they had something nice to say about you or your products and services. Not so fantastic if they had something nasty to say.

The fear of opening ourselves up to brickbats as well as bouquets is what stops many organisations from getting involved with the social web. But like conversation itself the social web is here to stay and is highly likely to integrate itself more and more with our everyday transactions – both social and commercial – so staying away will become less and less realistic. In any case organisations that open themselves up to criticism in such a public way find paradoxically, that managed well, they gain even from the brickbats. Dell Computers provides a fascinating and evergreen case study of this very point. First they feared the social web. Then they got a good kicking. Next they immersed themselves in it. And now they benefit from it hugely generating more than $1 million in sales directly from social media. The fashion retailer H&M is similarly instructive.

http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/why-dell-is-a-great-case-study/

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Why content is king(er) than ever!

Good quality content – and plenty of it – has always been the single most important part of any social media strategy. How else can you be genuinely “likeable” on Facebook and elsewhere and get followers who stick with you so that your organisation gets the visibility it needs to “sell” whatever it’s selling?

And now content is more important than ever before: “King-er,” to misquote Bill Gates. Why? Because liking a page on Facebook is no guarantee that you’ll see all that the page posts on your own timeline. For a while now you’ve got to like that page and tick the “get notifications” option.

Picture of Facebook's get notifications option
Why your followers must click like and get notifications

And what’s going to persuade your followers to take both of those crucial steps rather than just the first? Good quality content. If you’re posting stuff that’s useful to them in some way then they’ll genuinely want to see it on their timeline. If your content isn’t useful to them they won’t want it cluttering up their timeline. Simple as that!

So why did Facebook add the “get notifications” option in the first place? Because if it didn’t our news feeds would be jam packed with stuff we weren’t really interested in. Zuckerberg and his buddies are constantly tweaking the news feed algorithm that determines what we do and don’t see. And forget trying to outwit it. The only – and I mean the only – way to get seen is to post good stuff. Which means building content creation into your daily schedule.

Of course there’s a bit more to it than that. Determining the best time of the day or night to post, for example. But that’s another subject for another day.

 

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Setting up a Facebook group

Facebook groups are a great way of communicating with subsets of your audience. For example, you might have a page for your entire organisation but want to have different, separate – and sometimes private – conversations with suppliers and customers. Groups let you do this.

There are three types of group:

OPEN GROUPS which, as the name suggests, are open. Everyone can see who’s a member of an open group and everyone can see posts to the group’s timeline;

CLOSED GROUPS where group membership is visible but the posts are only visible to members of that group;

SECRET GROUPS where – you’ve guessed – nobody knows the group exists or can see its posts except, of course, group members.

I’ve set up a closed group for people who’ve been on our social media training courses as a place for the learning to continue after a face-to-face workshop. It’s perhaps how some of you will have found your way to this blog in the first place.

You can only set up a group when you’re logged in as yourself not as a page. But don’t worry there’s a work around. As yourself create the group and then share it on your page’s timeline. Here’s a step-by-step guide with pictures corresponding to each step at the bottom. Click on the image thumbnails to see the full screen version:

  1. Click on the downward arrowhead in the top righthand corner of the Facebook page and, if you’re not already using Facebook as yourself, click on your name where it says “use Facebook as.” This takes you to your profile page.
  2. Click on the Home button on the top bar. You’ll find it just to the right of your name. You’ll see a heading called GROUPS in the column to the left of the timeline.
  3. Click on create group.
  4. In the dialogue box that pops up give the group a name, add at least one member (well you can’t have a group of one!) and make it open, closed or secret. The closed option is selected by default. Don’t worry too much about who you add as a group member at this stage because you can add more later. You can also invite those outside of your circle of friends by email once the group’s set up. And once you’ve got additional members you can always delete the original member. Click okay to proceed.
  5. Choose an icon. I chose a mortar board for the social media training alumni group because it seemed vaguely appropriate but you can skip this step. Click okay.
  6. You can then personalise the group by adding a cover photo (the optimum size is 851 x 315 pixels) and a description.
  7. CRUCIAL STEP! Because you’re setting up this group for organisational reasons it’s really important you then share this group via your page by clicking on the share button in the bottom right hand corner of your cover picture (or where you’re cover picture would be if you haven’t uploaded an image yet). In the dialogue box click the arrowhead where it says “on your own timeline” and choose instead “on a page you manage.” If you manage multiple pages choose the relevant page and choose whether to post as yourself or as your page where it says “posting as.”  Type a welcome where it says “say something about this…” in greyed out text and finally click share group.

Well done you are now the proud owner of a Facebook group for business (even though you set it up as an individual)!

Next time groups versus pages – the pros and cons – plus the day to day running of a group.

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Spot the difference

Keith is clearly a pedant. The sort of bloke whose teeth grate when he see’s a missing or misplaced apostrophe. So as a fellow traveller I was clearly disturbed to receive an email from him pointing out that on the ACM Training website I’d used different to rather than, in his view, the grammatically correct different from. Not the sort of thing, he implied, that becomes someone who leads writing for business and writing for the web workshops. And quiet write two. A bit of research was called for…

Turns out Keith that we’re both right. Different to, different from and even different than are all in common usage. Different to mainly in English English. Different than in American English. And different from in both traditions, particularly among(st?) old school grammarians. I realise, of course, that just because something is in common usage doesn’t mean it’s grammatically correct. But language, as my old English teacher loved to point out, is in a state of flux and that the rules of grammar can barely keep up. There are those in the vanguard of change who wouldn’t bat a proverbial eyelid at, what those in the rearguard would describe as, a flagrant disregard for authority. As someone who sits somewhere in the middle of this linguistic battlefield my view is that we shouldn’t get too caught up in these grammatical skirmishes. To do so risks bringing on a bad case of writer’s block as we fret over whether our use of words will offend. Too many people find writing hard work. That’s why they attend our workshops. Certainly they shouldn’t ignore the conventions of grammar. But nor should they feel weighed down by them. What’s more important, surely, is that we all learn to write clearly, concisely and that our words achieve the effect we desire?

Oh and yes there was a deliberately misplaced apostrophe in the opening sentence just to discombobulate you.

 

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How many words are there in the English language?

As a trainer I pride myself on being able to answer the many questions my trainees ask. But here’s one that got me stumped on a writing workshop the other day: how many words are there in the English language? My initial response was to say “a lot” which, at the very least,  has the virtue of being correct but in every other respect isn’t terribly helpful. So here is my slightly more considered response…

It depends who you ask and how you count.

Ask an organisation called Global Monitor who profess to keep tabs on such things and they’ll tell you 1,019,729.6 (yes, you read that right – point six)!  They base this questionable figure on a trawl of English words on the web. Do the trawl manually through all 20 volumes of the Second Edition of the Oxford English Diction and you’ll arrive at the much lower (but still impressive) 171,476. They base their figure on words in current use and count the same word each time it has a distinct and different meaning. For example, the word dog appears at least three times in the OED list – once as a noun (as in the dog barked); once as a verb with a traditional meaning (as in to follow persistently); and once again as a verb with a more modern meaning (as in…well, you know what I mean and if you don’t use your imagination)!

Whoever’s figures you choose there’s no arguing it’s a lot. So why so many? Another good question and an easier one to answer…

It’s Harold’s fault!

Before Harold Godwinson was beaten in the Battle of Hastings the English language had a largely Germanic root thanks to the Angles and the Saxons who populated our island  from the east. Post 1066 William the Conqueror’s Norman buddies brought with them a whole new vocabulary rooted in French (itself rooted in Latin) and rather than supplanting the Anglo Saxon lexicon the two grew up alongside one another. And since then we’ve since added many other words borrowed from the various languages of our once huge Empire (from India bungalow, pajamas and  jodhpurs to list but a few).

This presents writers with a huge challenge: which word do we choose?

To fight or to battle that is the question

In his “we shall fight them on the beaches” speech Winston Churchill is said to have chosen the old word “fight” instead of the equally valid but newer word “battle” because he felt it would stir the British bulldog spirit more effectively. And you can’t argue with Churchill. So when you’re pondering which word to use, choose the one which conveys your meaning most precisely and which moves your reader most effectively. You don’t need to be spoiled for choice providing you choose well/select properly (delete/cross out as applicable).

Happy writing.

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BILLY NO MATES

What do you have to do to get likes on Facebook? It’s a question I’m often asked on my social media training workshops. And the answer I give is simple: be likeable. Just like in the real world if you’re not very nice in the virtual world you’ll end up as Billy No Mates.

There is another way of getting likes – paying for them. It works out around 14p per like which may not sound very much but that’s £140 per thousand and unless you get your money back by converting those likes onto something tangible you’re unlikely to see any kind of return on that investment. The BBC’s technology reporter wrote recently on this very subject  And in any case again like the real world you can buy friends but are they proper friends? Quite.

So we’re back to winning friends/likes by being nice. “Nice” in social media terms means offering something of value to your target audience. It might be funny, profound, insightful, thought provoking, creative…the list of content possibilities is long. It might be words, audio, video, a picture. It might be long. Or short. All your own work. Or a comment on somebody else’s.

Good content attracts visitors to your Facebook page or other social media sites. Consistently good content wins you friends, followers and likes.

That’s why content creation is the single most important part of your social media strategy. And the most time consuming.

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CUT THE RED TAPE

When I first started working for the BBC I was handed an inch-thick folder labelled “Producer Guidelines.” Small confession: I never read them or certainly not cover to cover as demanded. Be honest have you  read every word of your company’s staff guidelines? Of course you haven’t. Life’s too short.

I’m not saying that organisations shouldn’t have or don’t need rules and regulations. But if they’re over long there’s no point in having them in the first place because they wont get read. The same goes for social media guidelines – the rules of engagement if you like – that dictate staff use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Blogs (like this one) and all the other platforms too numerous to mention. Social media works best for organisations when those doing it have at least a modicum of fun. Over regulation threatens to make it unfun (if there isn’t such a word then there should be). And who in their right mind would want to spend a significant chunk of their lives doing unfun stuff? Not me.

So keep your own social media guidelines short, sharp and to the point. At ACM Training ours run to just a few lines:

Always remember why you’re doing it.
Try not to say anything really daft.
Really try not to say anything that will bring you or us into disrepute.
Use your common sense.
Re-read everything at least once before you hit the send button.
Have fun.
And remember if you really mess up you’re fired!

This article is an abridged extract from the social media training manual that accompanies my social media training workshop. If you’d like to read a sample chapter click here or if you’d like to book a place for just £99 on one ACM’s social media training courses click here.

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Using social media to kick racism out of soccer

Twitter and other social media platforms were implicated by the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in his press conference after the soccer summit at 10 Downing Street aimed at tackling racism in football. Hunt and the FA chairman David Bernstein said, in effect, that while overt racism was now much less a problem inside grounds, outside people were still making racist and homophobic remarks. And while in the past their audience may have numbered just a handful of tiny-minded idiots and those unfortunate enough to overhear the bile spilling out of their twisted mouths, they now have a much wider audience – online.

But legislating against them would be both difficult and, in my view, contrary to the open spirit of the social web. Even trying to outlaw them risks drawing far too much attention to odious individuals who haven’t the courage to make their foul remarks to someone’s face and hide behind the relative anonymity afforded by social network pseudonyms. And with a billion plus social network accounts to monitor we shouldn’t expect the networks themselves to do anything but passive monitoring. We might occasionally persuade the networks and the Internet Service Providers to deactivate the accounts and cut the connections of the worst offenders, but those offenders would soon set up new accounts from new IP addresses.

Better, surely, to simply ignore them. Don’t follow them on Twitter. Don’t retweet their posts – even if only to mock their narrow-mindedness from our lofty, liberal perches. Certainly don’t dignify their comments with comments of our own. Make them social network lepers. Deny them the oxygen of publicity, as we might have said in the old media days.

So here’s my social network manifesto…

Black footballers do a Joey Barton. Gay footballers come out of the closet and start Tweeting so we can follow you and show by simple force of numbers that the overwhelming majority of us – football lovers or not – are decent human beings. Stephen Fry has more than a million followers on Twitter and is a national treasure.

Don’t just let your footballing feet do the talking. Let your tweets do the talking too.