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The media140 Meetup and Social Media Evolution

By Adam Tinworth on January 13, 2010 7:38 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks
media140 Meetup
And so to the first media140 meetup, over in the City. Unusually for this sort of event, I've only recognised two faces (oh, three) here so far.

It's a grand total of eight months since I went to my first media140 event, and the mood and feel has changed completely. There's been a progressive move from the social media enthusiasts and evangelists to those who are trying to figure out how to integrate it into their businesses - and that's great. That's social media growing up.

But I am feel rather that the questions and answers I'm hearing aren't really adding to my sum of knowledge. In fact, there are things being said that I'd say were objectively wrong. "homogonised output on Twitter"? Uh, no. Luckily some voices are being raised in protest. But this is social media as a tool applied to existing processes rather than as a thought process, as a means of conversation. 

Charlie Osmond from Fresh Networks is being provocative by suggesting that the social media mantra of "go where the conversation is" is wrong. But his argument rather relies on the idea that the only conversation worth having is the marketing one. He gave the example of a vicar, who does his evangelism from the pulpit, but also goes to village fetes, etc. And that trying to evangelise at the fete would be a poor idea. And he's right in that. However, just trying evangelising from the pulpit if you haven't built a relationship with your parishioners by going and chatting at the fete...

He's a social media pragmatist rather than a social media purist, he suggests. I might ge tempted to insert the word "cynic" in place of "pragmatist". Certainly one could argue the methods he are advocating are cynical rather than genuine engagement...  :-)

Ooh, best idea of his bit: the last thing you want to do when launching a community is just open the doors. If you just open the doors of a restaurant, and it's empty on a Friday night, you have a problem. And that's bang on. And that brings us back to the vicar at the fete, talking to folks so they will come back to his sermons. 

And he's predicting a social media backlash. Which is pretty safe, as it's already started. :-) And, yes, I think he was being deliberately provocative up front, as he is talking what I would consider the talk, with sensible words about the fact it's going to take at least a year to build a community, and get genuine engagement.

And with that, I'm sneaking off home.

Nice cocktails from Ping Pong, though...

#media140 : Hemlock & AudioBoo

By Adam Tinworth on October 26, 2009 5:38 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Hemlock is an open-source environment for building social applications, with a gaming focus. There's a showcase of uses on the site.

AudioBoo - a low coast, efficient way of generating audio reports. The platform collects pictures, geodata and so on at the time of recording, and pushes it into a social, connected, embeddable environment. Currently, it's on the iPhone, with Android and web versions coming soon. And they're adding an API which will allow others to build clients. 

Podcasting was too complicated, suggests SEO MArk Rock. The idea of AudioBoo was to make audio publishing as easy as possible. In the short term, they'll monetise through pro services, from editing, to managing team contributions. 10 licences sold for the pro services - and it's not built yet!


#media140 : Information is Beautiful.

By Adam Tinworth on October 26, 2009 5:19 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
David McCandlessDavid McCandless (@mccandelish) has a book coming out. He didn't beat around the bush about that. He showed us the UK and US editions. But he's also interested in the growing visual literacy of the population through the growth of the web. 

If you come into the social space trying to sell something "you're a bit of a dick, really". What you can do is bring a gift - interestingness. If you're interesting, you'll get followed and you'll get retweeted. And the most interesting gift is the revealing gift. 

(This is a really hard session to liveblog, BTW. It's all about great, fascinating graphics.)

And I think what he's showing, and this should be of particular note to journalists, is how limited and uninspired our graphical representation of data is right now, and how illuminating it can be when done right. Asking the real-time web the right questions, and you can find some fascinating information - but give back. Give back into the social space what you create from that data.

Wonderful talk. Go read his blog.

#media140 : Show Me The Money - Bernard Desarnauts

By Adam Tinworth on October 26, 2009 4:54 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Last keynote of the day: Bernard Desarnauts of Glam Media and Tinker.com talking (in theory) about where the money is.

Media is every-fragmenting. Blogs are growing as are social networks. Traffic is fragmenting around topics, and traditional sites are drawing a small and smaller amount of people's time. The traditional places where advertisers spent money are becoming less and less relevant. 

So, the answer is distributed media - go where the audience is. And that's brought them 12m uniques worldwide - by focusing on mid to long tail.

Tinker - instead of following people, you follow topics. They use semantic analysis to find relevant content wherever it is. Beyond that, they create widgets that contain the conversation within them. You don't force people to come to Tinker - you can push the conversation out to where they are. 

Has been used by many media brands. They use algorithmic and manual filtering to curate the flow of content. They have direct API access to the Twitter "firehose". Most customers only want the Twitter data. 

[This feels a bit like a sales pitch rather than a case study]

#media140 : Who's your brand?

By Adam Tinworth on October 26, 2009 4:12 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
This panel looks interesting. The relationship between individual personality and brand is clearly an uncomfortable one for many people here, and exploring that looks worthwhile. In the driving seat: Gordon MacMillan, Social Media and International Editor of Haymarket.

Candace Kuss (@candancekuss) Hill & Knowlton: Personality is not the same as a character.

Drew Benvie (@drewb), 33 digital: Social media is full of fake and FAIL. The conversation about character and personality needs to happen. People need to learn to be personal about personality. 

Ruth Mortimer
Will Mcinnes (@willmcinnes), NixonMcinnes: Does a brand have a personality? Once we get past the social media as the new new, we need to understand what the organisation's DNA is.

Ruth Mortimer (@marketingweeked), Marketing Week: Every brand already has a personality - it's about how you use it.

Richard Baker (@richard_baker), Virgin Trains: Not every customer care wether or not you have a personality. Some just want information. The skill is about tailoring response to the right customers. 

Richard is making the point quite strongly that marketing can't own social media. It's cross-functional and just as important to, say customer service. Candace is backing him up, restating that the best thing people can do is listen - and spend a long time listening, and then they can keep it real because they've seen how to do it.
Continue reading #media140 : Who's your brand?.

#media140 : The Survivors' Club

By Adam Tinworth on October 26, 2009 3:26 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks
Jess GreenwoodI'm uncomfortable with some of this panel's message. There seems to be a distinct undertow of "how do we control the message through Twitter. The examples we're being given seem to be using Twitter as just another channel, maybe to give a veneer of engagement, without a reality to it.

ASOS seems to be the notable exception right now, but let's see how the panel develops.

Amelia Torode from VCCP suggests that it's about the right people doing the right things...

And this panel has almost been completely hijacked by the Twitterfeed... Running jokes about the guy from Innocent, Ted Hunt.

Some suggestion that Twitter is a passing fad, and it will be replaced by something else next year, but that feels like someone who isn't really engaged.

Look, the  real lesson of this panel was that, if a panel is insufficiently interesting, using a Twitterwall will sabotage it. Fascinated people don't undermine sessions with jokey tweets, they tweet reaction to people's statements - or just tweet the statements. Despite the best efforts of chair Jess Greenwood of Contagious magazine, this is actually a classic counter to the sentiment that I saw emerging at the start of the panel - about controlling the message. With so many people able to publish now, you can't control the message - you can just join in.


#media140 : Learning To Listen

By Adam Tinworth on October 26, 2009 1:22 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Ciarán NorrisFormer colleague Ciarán Norris is going to tell us how to listen.

Use your ears?

:)

First up: why should we listen on Twitter? Exponential growth in the last year, for one. We've had a growth of people at the creator end of the scale. First you had know HTML, then you had to have a blog, and now you just need Twitter, a mobile phone and maybe a cameras. 

And because of that, Google is now your company front page, and other people's work maybe on the front page and more interesting than yours. Tools like ViralTracker allow them to follow how pieces of work spread across the web. Delicious is still a good way of seeing how people view your brand. Tweetdeck gives you the ability to understand and monitor Twitter across multiple accounts. Tweetfunnel allows multiple people to manage one account. Tweetmeme tracks how links are spread around Twitter. They're adding analytics (which I'm testing and it's cool). Twitterfall, great way to check what people are saying around a brand.

But: some perspective. 2% of Iranians have access to Twitter, so it's the "liberal intelligentsia talking to the liberal intelligentsia in the west".

Some good examples: 

#media140 : "Do"s and "Don't"s in Social Media

By Adam Tinworth on October 26, 2009 12:48 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
The idea of brands joining in on people's private conversations is just creepy, suggests Lloyd Davis (alloyddavis) of the Tuttle Club. 

  • Be honest and transparent, don't lie or fake it.
Daren Forsyth (@darenBBC) points out that human is basically the default mode of Twitter. Think about how human and how subtle you can be. 

And the converse? Habitat. Lots of debate as to wether the rules of social media are obvious, or need thinking about. If they're so obvious, why did Habitat get it so wrong. The answer offered is that it was "a kid", but that seems like a cop-out. 

George Nimah (@iboy) is doing his best to kick the panel more into gear, but suggesting that a panel of advertising folks talking about evidence is up there with military intelligence as an oxymoron. We need more honesty, like being honest that Peperami was as much about saving money in a recession as about being creative. (Follow the money.)

Daljit Bhurji of Diffusion PR (@daljit_bhurji) suggests that it's as much about how you turn things around in a crisis. Dell has recovered brilliantly from Dell Hell, and even Habitat now has a good agency behind their Twitter stream. (An agency. Not people in the company. Doesn't sound good to me). 

Lloyd raises the issue of celebs using their entourage to tweet for them - which does their image harm. George says it's about being clear. If you tweet under your name, make sure it's you. If you tweet under a brand name, be clear who it is that's tweeting on behalf of a brand. 

I like Daren's suggestion that companies need to identify their conversationalists - and all have them already - and use them as their social media first line, as it were.

Two pieces of wisdom from Lloyd: We're all making this up as we go along, and don't use spam bots.
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