Digital Trail

As we draw ever closer to election day it is curious that the Tory vision of the ‘Big society’ has all but disappeared. This is by no means a party political broadcast on behalf of any given party but an examination of the idea of the Conservative proposed big society with reference to social media.

Why ‘Big society’ had all the hallmarks of a social media framework

The idea of empowering the many, the consumer, and not the centralised few was a brave vision to present. Going big on the YOU and actioning plans for what would essentially be social re-engineering was always going to be a tall order but I think it might work in some areas.
The lack of Tory social media use was a big indicator that the ‘Big society’ as a social governance framework was disingenuous, if not disingenuous, then certainly not executable with a ‘walk the talk’ conviction. It is widely accepted that ‘Call me Dave’ and co shun Twitter, despite an online savvy and rapid response predisposition to conducting online campaigning by buying up keyword slots on search terms.

Missed opportunities

This isnt to say that the other parties do social media – in particular, Twitter – any better. The lack of local level, voter engagement and policy discussion – or at least linking to personal MP blogs giving policy a lengthier going over – has been conspicuous by its absence. We still vote on paper; this is not a digital election. A few Photoshopped posters does not a digital election make.

Twitter has been overused by MPs as a biting back-channel, flooded with bickering or rallying prominent members of the media to look more favourably on one’s version of events.

The ‘Big Society’ ideal of buying out your local pub or intervening as a collective on failing schools has had very little mention during the TV debates and given the coverage the TV debates have had–  or will have by the end of their run– that is a minimum of 9 days of campaign time taken up by the TV debates and you would be forgiven for thinking the ‘Big society’ manifesto launch was a utopian dream you once heard about and not a document of a tangible future society on offer for those with a vote and a genuine desire for genuine change. As an aside, the design of the Labour manifesto was more in keeping with the Conservative vision and yet the ‘Big society’ was presented in cold, lifeless bound copy.

Can social media enable the ‘Big society’

Lest we forget that Twitter is but a bit part in the bigger social media picture, it offers another direct route of access between the public and elected members of Parliament, Councils and other organisations. There is already a proven use of the web empowering anyone with an internet through the use of the various MySociety offshoots. Fixmystreet, Theyworkforyou and so on. These are all examples of where the barriers for engagement have been broken down and are making a difference in communities. The rise of Tweetminister, allbeit under-resourced and under increased scrutiny for fact-checking during the campaign period, it has added to the emphasis that social media absenteeism is a functional faux pas for any elected or wannabe elected candidate.

There are also examples of where existing government have tried to enable “the great ignored” and left them as so. The ability to generate a petition on the Number 10 website saw hundreds of issues fail to gain traction and even one of those that gained mass support was rejected outright for petitioning for Gordon Brown to quit as PM. The Facebookification of democracy is perhaps a democracy-lite oversimplification but the systems exist and the once vocal minorities now have a platform to have a voice.

There was real potential for the ‘Big society’ vision, enabling the public to direct their existence with a helping hand from passive Government and yet we are left with nothing more than a ‘Big Society’ little whisper.

Bristol Twestival would be nothing without it’s organisers and so it is that I have taken it upon myself to write up a few recommendations as to how and why the Bristol Twestival team are outstanding individuals.

This is not an exercise in sucking up or anything sycophantic. In reality, I have spent very little time with several of these people. Such is the pervasive nature of online communication, Bristwestival was pulled together with few face to face meetings.

Matt Anderson – @PRBristolblog

Making things work and pulling in the right people at the right time. Matt is a motivated and skilled coordinator and always good for a chat.

Dan Martin – @Dan_Martin

The one with the vision to do serious social good with social media and the ability to take on the bulk of the organisation. If you want someone who will drop everything to make a difference for you and the wider community, Dan will do it and then some.

Becky Midgley – @Reeb1981

The bubbly spirit in the team that keeps smiling and encouraging others to push themselves further. Her enthusiasm for the event, but above all, the cause has been fantastic.

Gina Dyer – @GDyer

The girl with the perma-smile, constant energy and packs a mean goody bag. The height of sincerity and the perfect first person to meet at the start of the evening.

Jay Williams – @jaywilliamspr

Always keen to make his connections count and to put everything into doing the absolute best he can for everyone. I’ve had a lot of online contact with Jay and had been keen to meet the man behind the relentless quest to make Twitter count and to have a good time with it. He didn’t disappoint.

Avinash Patil – @niteglow

The shining light amongst us. A social media enthusiast to get anyone involved with Twitter and did he tell you about the aliens?

Sam Downie – @samdownie

Full of ideas and working the radio PR channels to promote the event and providing a crowd eye view of the event on camera.

Thank you to everyone that came out to play. There have been some great stories coming out from the night and the fact we smashed our fundraising target reflects how connected the Bristol Twitter community is and the serendipitous nature of social media.

Community has been given a new lease of life online. As soon as you hop on to a network of people you are more than just connected. Community offers a range of elements, from support to strength in numbers.

Too often people can fear the idea of a business community because they think that being active within one will mean revealing too many secrets, especially in a community that contains rival companies. From the offset this can create a strained atmosphere, a stifling of group creativity and also, cliques.

A recent example, allbeit offline, of a barista introducing a dis-loyalty card in London’s trendy (Obligatory prefix) Shoreditch, is testament to businesses uniting together for the greater good.

Like Minds is proving to be a bit of a social change movement, with a lofty aim of generating £100,000 of revenue for the City of Exeter and in doing so proving the often questioned ROI from social media. The conference will bring great benefit to more then just the attendees and in turn will make a great gesture of support to the local business community. Other conferences do nothing or simply make a token gesture of planting a tree to offset carbon emissions.

Coming together for social good is something that social media is uniquely set up for. The boundaries are reduced, the red tape of charity is snipped, and things just get done. Take the Twestival organisation, initially, a near impromptu coming together of Twitter users in a handful of cities hosting a simultaneous putting-faces-to-avatars meetup, doubling up as fun-filled fundraising event. In this its second year, it is a more coordinated affair and because of the exponential growth of smartphones and users of Twitter, it will be a more powerful force for good. Bristol’s Twestival takes place on Thursday 25 March.

I am wary that the role of social media is overplayed in circumstances. Social media is an enabler and nothing more but for charitable and community gain it can certainly get things going.

How do you work within a community and what opportunities has community presented you?

So are lists a practical, necessary piece of functionality?

Is it the golden egg that will monetise Twitter? No. What it is indicative of is Twitter’s desire to bolt on the functionality already offered by the likes of Tweetdeck et al. If you have customised groups in Tweetdeck already it is hard to make a case for Twitter lists adding much more value.

Always last picked…

For many or the more casual user, lists will be to highlight, organise and maintain a following. I fully expect lists to be predominantly used to cream off the followers you wish to actively follow and monitor and I also anticipate, by extension, the new functionality to manifest itself as a further online popularity contest. Breaching an inner circle online is harder than it is in the school playground and certain online communities are hamstrung by cliques. Time will tell with Twitter lists…If your name isn’t down you’re not coming in.

Personal

As a blogger (by no means a Pro with ideas above the station) and someone with a Twitter profile with an intended purpose of sharing and creating great engaging stuff, it is nice to see which categories my followers group me in and confirms I am on track with where I want to be, the online circles in which I wish to move.

What do Twitter lists mean to you?

Celebrity endorsements are nothing new, if anything, in this uber celebrity 15 minutes of fame driven society they are on the increase but what do they actually do for brands and where are the endorsements of the future going?

There are recent notable examples of brands dropping their celebrity face in the wake of revelations and tabloid conjecture. Notably, Kerry Katona, the bastion of motherhood, being ditched by Iceland on the back of Sunday tabloid revelations relating to substance abuse beyond a £1 Iceland ready-meal.

When pairing up a celebrity with a brand and things go well, it is easy to kick back and relax. That massive chunk of funding you have given this public eye entity was money well spent. Gary Lineker never got booked in his career and has carved a niche as ‘Mr Nice Guy’ so no sweat over him doing something bad like popping a cheeky Pringle.

But a brand can not control the one they pay to endorse. You can have as water-tight a contract as you like that says as a beacon of the brand you can not do this or dabble in that, but celebrities are human, they are suckers for temptation when they are offered the world and they do stray.

To the future, I envision a slight change in the role of celebrity endorsements and this is with a view to the use of Twitter and Facebook. This theory is based on observations of how things are starting to unfold on these platforms.

Agencies can now create the celebrity and thus control their brand endorsing face more carefully. For example, Compare the Market and their ingenious and ubiquitous Compare the Meerkat campaign has seen sales increase and thanks to a combined social media assault through Facebook and Twitter, Sergei – the little furry face of cheaper car insurance has single paw-dly hit the big time. Through an interactive and engaging Twitter and Facebook account, not to mention the Compare the Meerkat website itself, our little Russian friend has driven traffic and sales to the desired Compare the Market website without a single mention of the target site in its Facebook or Twitter activity. No tweets with links to the best deal or target site homepage, just pure character based tweets and a killer catchphrase that has reverberated around playgrounds, offices and everyday conversation. Simples.

Facebook and Twitter celebrity accounts with mass followings (and comparatively minuscule follow backs themselves) provide a ready made platform to endorse anything for a fee to their impressionable and idolising following. The rules have changed and results are there for the taking.

If you take the example of Stephen Fry and his Twitter account, not through paid for endorsement but out of his passion to share great Tech tips, on several occasions, Mr Fry has brought small time websites to their knees by Tweeting a recommendation to his vast following to go and check out site X. Site X not being prepared for such a volume of traffic crashes-the hat tip from Mr Fry a blessing and curse in equal measure.

So of the future, celebrity accounts will be created and maintained by agencies and not the Celebs themselves. (I am still hugely sceptical that Andy Murray updates his Twitter given the nature of the Tweets-all smiles and positivity-it appears awkward, forced and just not personable.) As soon as the following is built up, then the link to product or website X is casually dropped into Twitter conversation and the loyal following navigates to the intended source and laps up what their idol has recommended.

Sure the same pitfalls apply in that you cannot control the celebrity’s behaviour in real life, that is of course unless you create  a fictional Meerkat, but you can cultivate the following and control the brand message with a yield of higher results for a fraction of the cost of a television advert.

As a point of interest and using Wordle, a favourite tool of mine, I took it upon myself to run the transcripts of the two key speeches of this year’s event through the program to create a visual representation of the speeches.

Firstly, Lord Mandleson’s effort-which to watch looked clumsy, choreographed and almost beyond Carry On parody-we can see the key phrases used were ‘Change,’ ‘Party,’ ‘Back,’ and ‘Growth.’ For me this indicates the theme of looking back and looking forward. If New Labour is dead then New New Labour is now being offered as a choice and the party is on the cusp of a rebirth or a landslide. Time and the democratic process of an election will tell if Mandy’s speech was the healer or the false hope of the Labour party.

Gordon Brown’s speech ran along a similar theme of ‘Choice,’ ‘Change’ and ‘New,’ with policy revisions tantamount to backtracks (ID Cards) and whoppers of vast financial implications such as a National Care Service. No doubt the NCS will be talked up as revolutionary as the NHS when such a system was first pitched but will it ever see the light of day?

Oh and just a final thought on the theme of ‘Choice,’ which of the speeches was to the public and which was to the party? Mandy addresses his audience as “Conference” on numerous times but Gordon was more engaging with the camera and less erratic in his movements. So, PM for PM or stick with GB…?

Consider this–social media–all bells and whistles and caught up in a storm of hype and false industry. Been knocking around for a while finding its feet and having many people shout about what it is but where is it going?

There is a lot of talk and trumpet blowing by those who use social media about just how great it is. This is dull, I’m guilty of it myself. If we are to take this highly polished conker and to make it last, it is imperative to talk about the ‘how’ and not the ‘what’ in order to defend its role and to gather a pool of wisdom on how best to utilise it.

You can varnish and buff up a Conker to make it look good and if your the kid in the playground you can talk it up as you take it into the challenge ahead in a Conker fight. You can blow the trumpet of social media all you want and talk it up as a great thing but that won’t keep it up there or concrete it as a true marketing practice of value and return. Just because it looks good and on the surface does not mean it has a soft and vulnerable core when the challenges come in.

I invited Brrism member Nigel Legg to offer his insight into the matter of how social media can offer value for businesses looking to get in on the act and where it fits in the marketing mix. Based on his expertise as a social media practitioner who researches its nuances and practical applications, Nigel said:

“The only way you are going to be able to measure ROI is with numbers – so it is vital that you decide what numbers you want and how you are going to measure them before you start. And the appropriate metrics for a biscuit company may well not be appropriate for a construction firm – the metrics will depend on who you are, where you are, and what you do.”

In October there is an exciting conference on the horizon that has set it’s stall out from the start in saying it will focus on the ‘How’ and less so on the ‘What’. Of particular and crucial focus is the look at return of investment to be had from social media.

I shall be in attendance at the ‘Like Minds‘ event in Exeter on Friday 16th October and will report back on the ‘How’ and we will see if we can get this sweet social media nut flourishing into a long term practice with true value and purpose.

I think it is very true that as social media users, the honeymoon period is over and the ‘What’ is a known entity. The real way to achieve longevity is to suss the ‘How’ and to use it to supplement marketing practices, not replace them.

Originally published by Marketing Donut in my guise as a blogger for small businesses looking to get the most from their marketing.

In a downturn, it isn’t just small businesses that look to make their pennies stretch further or spend more time investing time resources into ‘free’ marketing opportunities but they certainly have a greater opportunity to do such things. If trade is down and money is tight, things might look bleak and the marketing resources cupboard somewhat bare.

One way that you may choose to keep on top of your marketing activities, even if the budget has run out, is to try out something that requires little or no money (beyond buying a computer and internet connection). Social Networking or online media resources are a great way to make use of your time in an inexpensive manner in order to drum up trade and to make sure your business is ‘out there.’

If you are unfortunate enough to have less footfall than you are accustomed to in headier times, you may be in a position to spend more time on Twitter, Facebook and any of the hundreds of online social networking sites where you can promote, network, converse or establish your brand and make real connections. If you do this well you may see that trade picks up again and so you have less time to commit to online activities as you are dealing with fantastic customers making purchases. When trade does pick up once again, does online marketing through social networking have to give?

I believe in the cliché that tough times make us stronger but beyond that I anticipate that this recession has rewritten the rules of small business marketing and the online marketing model of the future will see social networking as a standard practice in advertising for small firms. When the tills are ringing again and the ‘R’ word is but a distant memory, try and set aside short and frequent bursts of online marketing activity, be it Twitter, Blogging or Facebook, for great results long-term.

I started my new role within BHP Information Solutions this week and an integral part of this Online Editorial role is to run the hugely exciting Marketing Donut Blog. As another aspect of my job is to run the Twitter account for the Donut, I was very much aware of the Twitter downtime this week and the impact it had on the social media world. I wrote a blog post on the train in to work the next day as part of my reflective daily commute. You can view the blog post here

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Yesterday (Sunday) was the annual Bristol Media Football 5-a-side competition. Our Team, representing our parent company BHP Information Solutions put in a solid performance and narrowly missed out on getting through to the Quarter Finals. But that’s another story for another time…

This morning, as I hauled my weary ageing body up from what was an otherwise brilliant slumber, I realised that it wasn’t my legs which were aching but my arms. I did not play in goal, did not perform any stunning handstands having scored or anything like that. Of course my natural course of action and instinct was to Tweet the fact I had aching arms:

Why do my arms ache more than my legs after football yesterday?

A few minutes later I had a reply from a Twitter follower:

Re: football arms. A core strength issue. You’ve been using your arms/shoulders to keep your balance. Work on abs&back!

So there we have it. I get to have a good little moan on Twitter and someone offers me real, practical advice to rectify the problem in the future-even if they are highlighting that my fitness is not what it should be!

You can follow me on Twitter and give me further practical advice on any issue I have a little moan about by clicking here