Tag Archives: Social media

Current affairs, Media & Marketing, Social media

French gov’t bans mentions of social networks by name on radio

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I love this:

How do you say Facebook and Twitter in French? You don’t – at least, not if you are on radio or television, where French officials have banned any mention of them unless they are specifically part of the story.

Conspiracy theorists springing up all over the place as to why they’ve done it; the rationale makes a kind of sense to me, however – it’s in the spirit of fairness, so as to not discriminate against other lesser, commercial social networks. Even if its total rubbish, I love that sentiment. There’s something very colonial about it, and I’m surprised the British (given the other strictures at the BBC about supporting commercial organisations) haven’t tried it ("that anti-competition stuff, old boy, it’s simply not cricket.")

At least, force broadcasters to mention (and have a presence on) every other social network in the spirit of fairness. It’d take a week…

Shopping, Social media

Interaction with brands on Twitter

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Twitter logoI’ve tweeted at a few brands recently to satisfy my blog-curiosity about one thing or the other. @amazonuk to ask about packaging,  @mini to point out that its website wasn’t working properly in Chrome, @duracelluk to ask about its AA battery charger, @qwertee_com to let them know about my t-shirt review (and give them an opportunity to defend the quality of the cotton) and possibly one or two other media programmes (the Apprentice, Game of Thrones et al).

Now I know that the media programmes will be inundated with mentions, and perhaps even Amazon might get more tweets than it could cope with, but Mini was the only company to get back to me. The theory of having a direct connection to a business is a good one but it seems that not everyone is coping as well with providing an outlet to direct interaction as you’d hope.

I think brands should stick a disclaimer up there if the account isn’t monitored, or if people don’t intend to respond. It’s only fair to set expectations…. You can understand why even slightly arbitrary studies like this one come to the conclusions that they do… Or maybe it’s that – as a mere customer and a PageRank 2 blog writer – I don’t merit their attention…

Dadblogging, Media & Marketing, Miscellany, Social media

Baby social media management services

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Chris (and Tom and Damian) came to visit this weekend, and as is inevitable when {heavy irony} social media gurus {/heavy irony} come together, we brainstormed new business concepts.

Well, maybe not entirely new, but ‘Baby Social Media Management’ seemed a concept worth exploring, so we checked if http://emi.ly was available (it wasn’t, already registered to some doting Bavarian dad, apparently) and considered other stratagems for maximising my 7-month-old daughter’s social graph. Knowem seems particularly well named for my daughter’s use…

As part of this discussion, Chris pointed me at this case study – which, needless to say, is dynamic, interactive, synergistic, integrated social media success.

Pink pony integrated marketing campaign ftw
Media & Marketing, Observational

Simple language is best

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I ran a training session just before I went on sabbatical on various social media bits and pieces, showing people how to use search engines to find key phrases – amongst many other things.

Over the course of the session, which I tried to keep jargon free, I somehow managed to tell people that they should "concatenate their search terms" and use "Boolean search." I was also talking about influence and sentiment analysis, so there was a lot of jargon floating around that I couldn’t seem to avoid.

I think us social media-y types (oh, god, is that what I am?) should have our own translation engines, like the Bank of England. Check it out :

Inflation is likely to pick up to between 4% and 5% in the near term, and to remain well above the 2% target throughout 2011, boosted by the increase in VAT, higher energy and import prices, and some rebuilding of companies’ margins.

Which means:

You will continue to be squeezed in the next couple of months by the government, overseas governments and companies.

Otherwise we might as well just be doing this.

(As an aside – I love that the CItyWire piece, in addition to clever writing, included a bit of clever coding. That principle – of creative storytelling in new ways, whether through interpretation or presentation of information and analysis – is one of the key things that will keep people passionate about traditional media venues, IMHO).

Internet

Social reading

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My Google Reader subscriptions have gone slightly unread since the sabbatical started – it’s been pretty busy getting around Malaysia and doing all the thing we’ve been trying to do – so I miss my social reading circle. On Google Reader myself and a few friends and relatives share stories – including my friend Damian, my colleague Scot, my cousin Ashvina, my brother Arvind and a few others. Chris and Tom, whilst massively digital, have favoured delicious for social bookmarking so unfortunately our Greader sharing  hasn’t quite clicked (although I do follow their bookmarks via RSS…).

I enjoy this social filtering of news for the same reason I enjoy watching the same films or reading the same books as people I know, trust and respect – it’s fun to have things in common to discuss, and to have a shared social/cultural context. My friends and family often share points of interest, of course, which means the filtering is generally more interesting than not.

Unfortunately, the act of using Google Reader and RSS subscriptions lies beyond the ken of most people I know, and the majority of my friends that share links (in itself a minority) do so on Twitter or via Facebook – which I sometimes catch, but due to the volume of stuff that passes through my Facebook newsfeed and my Twitter friends lists,  I miss most of these. I almost never read stories that are forwarded to me by email, incidentally – when I’m getting through my email the emphasis is productivity and that means prioritizing emails that require some kind of action (a reply, forward, action on my part). I probably need to get the hang of Readitlater.

I’m not sure what I need to make this work better. The downside to convergence to a single platform like Facebook for all your digital interactions is restricting noise. I want personal updates from my friends on Facebook – pictures, events, news, engagements, babies etc. I want news shared via Google Reader. I like debate, insight and breaking news via Twitter and the blogosphere. But whilst I can change my own social media strategy, I can’t change the world. I can but lament that RSS as a technology seems to be something that people see as complex, and so resist using, and continue to quietly evangelise Google Reader to everyone I meet…

Incidentally, I quite like that in the Kindle apps sections of books that have been highlighted by other readers are indicated as you’re reading it. Quite nice to have vital passages or particularly interesting bits pre-selected for additional attention… Social reading of books seems to be the way things are going too!

What do you think about social reading?

Social media

My personal social media syndication strategy

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The blog is connected to the… Twitter… The Twitter’s connected to the… Google Buzz… The Google Buzz is connected to the Facebook… and somewhere it all ends up a mess.

Inspired by this new WordPress feature, I’ve been trying to work out how to best link my various social sharing tools so that people can keep up with me as they’d like to. Here’s where I’ve ended up by way of automatic syndication / cross posting:

1) My blogs (this one and LSR) syndicate to Twitter, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and my Facebook page

2) My Google Reader shared items (interesting news stories I’ve seen around the web) syndicate to Twitter, and Google Buzz

3) Twitter syndicates to nowhere; if you’d like to keep up with my Tweets, follow me. I don’t think I’ve even connected it to LinkedIn.

4) Flickr syndicates to Facebook and Google Buzz (although I use it less and less these days)

5) I don’t pay attention to FriendFeed, Quora, MySpace, FourSquare, YouTube, Friendster or any of the half-dozen or so other, less useful to me social venues. But who knows, someday I may do.

6) Gyminee / Dailyburn may become useful again once I restart the diet and the half-marathon training, and Runkeeper probably needs integrating somewhere – it does automatically post to Facebook.

If the world understood and used RSS readers I’d be less concerned about all of this, but given that not all of you do, I’m going with this approach. Hopefully its focussed enough and there isn’t so much overlap its annoying.

I need a personal social media strategy? Who knew!?

What do you do to simplify the share/follow experience for your friends/fans/family?

Books, Media & Marketing, Social media

Raymond E Feist backlist – thanks, Voyager!

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Who says nobody wins online competitions? I entered a competition from Voyager Books, which I learned of via their e-newsletter (sign up here) and last month received a large box of books from the publishers with Raymond E Feist’s entire backlist! Of course, as a loyal fan I already have many of these but there’s a few titles I was missing and it’ll make a great gift… Pics may follow when I’ve finished sorting out boiler issues.

Thanks to Voyager, and do sign up if you’re an SF / Fantasy fans (the next competition will let you win Robin Hobb’s backlist, which I read my way through earlier this year). They also give a bunch of good stuff away via their Twitter handle, but I’ve not had the good fortune to win there…