original thinking – slides
As promised, here’s a link to my slides from the original thinking event last week at Intergage.
Starting to settle into the new office, quite nice to have a 4 min walk to work!
My top tip for today (mainly because its a new feature that I’d wanted for ages) -
post notes to Facebook Fan pgaes via RSS… and/or publish them as an RSS feed back out.
No more re-posting blog entries as notes manually, or using one of the RSS apps (that never seemed to update automatically) – there’s a new option under the edit options on the fan page (see above), handy!
…and yes, I have set up a fan page for Alex’s Good Food Cafe, I liked it so much I moved into the basement
Read Morecomparing the meerkats
Simply genius.
I was going to write a longer analysis of why i think this is a superb campaign, but most of it has been done very eloquently on the SEO Optimise blog.
Compare the meerkat works as a campaign for one key reason, it sets them apart from what has become a very competitive sector where the offering and price (ie free) is essentially the same for everyone.
How else would you compete in this market? Superior offering, better customer usability/feedback or huge market awareness?
A simple clever play on words, with a good social media marketing strategy (facebook fan page, twitter etc) and a simple mock website equals brand recognition though the roof.
The only thing I would of done differently would be to make it possible to link to specific meerkats on the site, if you find one that amuses you, all you can share with friends is the options that you chose to find that meerkat – people like to share the specifics too.
Read MoreFacebook moving forward
There’s a lot written today about Facebook launching their new service Connect.
Connect allows you to login to partner websites using your Facebook account and for information to flow from that site into your feed and friend information to pass back to the partner site. This is part of a wider plan by Facebook to become the standard for social interaction.
OpenID set out to be the standard for connecting people across the web, plenty of big name partners supported OpenID but yet… outside the industry, who knows it exists?
There’s another important part of the strategy for net domination, that hasn’t received as much discussion: Facebook are taking steps to reduce the amount of people using ordinary Facebook accounts as a promotional tool. They are really clamping down on fake profiles and have put in places limits for how many group messages you can send out rather than using updates or advertisements.
The real strength in Facebook is in having 99.999% of users as real people, that is what makes it stand out from most other networks.
If Facebook can keep the balance of community vs commercial messages right, people will stay. A lot of users left MySpace when the volume of messages that were “hey you’ve never heard of me but please check out my tracks” overtook the messages between friends.
Sure some people will be put out when their profiles are deleted (after being warned) BUT it won’t cause the bulk of people to move.
This brings me nicely back to my talk, the social web in 10 slides – where I talk about the importance of interacting and engaging with the community in the right way.
If you (as a business) want to promote yourself on a social network, you have to be really clear to understand how that network works and how best to mobilise that network for your benefit whilst playing by their rules.
Read Morethe power of the network
I needed to tap into my network of people across a few social networking sites today, to recruit a part-timer for a project and to see if anyone could help find a home for the Social Tech Solutions empire.
In total my update went out to around 750 people across three platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) – through a status message I sent out a simple request for people to get in touch.
I’d hoped for 10 or so, during the day…
…within 30 minutes I had 30 replies.
Wow.
THAT is the power of the network, to be able to broadcast out a simple message – in this case on twitter, which automatically updated my Facebook status (would be nice if LinkedIn status could be done via twitter too – hint hint, any techy friends listening?) and get 30 replies in 30 minutes.
An hour later, I was visiting an office space with a friend/business partner of mine which we’ll likely rent together and I have plenty of likely candidates.
In further evidence of the power of the network: I noticed a business contact had changed their LinkedIn status to mention they were working on a particular project… which I was writing an article about for here (to be published later in the week – when its finished) a quick email exchange later and a meeting is set up so we can collaborate.
Within 2hrs my network has provided:
A good group of potential employees
A business partnership
and Office space
My “Springers final thought for the day” – courtesy of GrindVision:
the most successful people are great networkers and in in this day and age the most successful businesses are great at social media
I couldn’t agree more.
Read Morewhy your business needs to engage with social networking
Facebook now has 120 million active users.
That is 2% of the worlds population.
Think about that for a minute, if you take out those who dont use or have access to the internet – thats a high percentage of people.
We’ve decided to conduct a simple survey of 100 people who work in businesses around our area – how many use social networking, how many have a business strategy for it… now that’s something else to think about!
As soon as we’ve completed and compiled our survey, we’ll publish it here.
Read More
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