Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category
Wooohoooo! It’s Follow Friday again!
I’ve spent the day at #NetworkCentral09 (or at least a chunk of it – the rest was spent trying to get a train from Taunton and getting soaked and cold – but the least said about that the better!). Anyway, this week’s #followfriday’s all come from #NetworkCentral09!
@Claire_Sloane is one person who really understands social media. She engages with people online and gives you a smile – which is pretty good going. She’s also a cracking photographer and you can find her work here.
@JackieDawks is a top recruiter and also the Chairman of Devon Air Ambulance Trust. She’s also fab online with a wicked sense of humour.
And finally @MattYoungDJ who you will know as half of Matt and Dani at breakfast on Heart Exeter. In a moment of triumph for social media, he managed to wangle a Heart mug for one of my colleagues using only charm and the power of Twitter!
Thank you my three #followfriday Muskatweets for giving me lots of laughs.
Socialholic x
Have you ever tried to tweet under water?
I don’t want to get to smug but I live on a hill. A big hill. I’m near the coast but I’m on a really big hill.
Did I mention the hill?
The reason that I ask is that I amazed by the lack of tweets about Copenhagen.
In case you get all your news from Twitter and have, therefore, missed it, we are just a few days away from one of the most important environmental conferences that there has ever been. Its success or failure will quite literally shape the map of the world in years to come.
That might sound like hyperbole but consider the incredibly small rise in sea levels that will wipe out swathes of Norfolk – and that is before you consider the massive amounts of land around the world that lies at or near sea level. The loss of those habitats for both humans and land animals will mean less land to live on, migration and higher population densities. And that is before you consider the other changes in land use that will be necessary.
All of those things will have an inevitable knock on effect on weather patterns and, current models suggest that that will include massive desertification, loss of farm land, greater levels of drought and starvation.
By now, you are either nodding enthusiastically or you are bemused as to why I am going off on one.
Well, I am frustrated. The pre-Copenhagen talks have broken up in Barcelona (as the Guardian reports here) and the outcome looks bleak. What they are arguing about is beyond me – our entire ecosystem is in serious trouble and governments are quibbling numbers.
And Twitter is not over-capacity as a result of tweets about Copenhagen. Maybe you are waiting for someone to start talking about it. Maybe you are waiting for someone to get angry. Maybe we haven’t got the time to wait any more.
All those of us who use Twitter are amazed when our Tweets force someone to resign or do something or not do something. ’The Power of Twitter’ – we’ve all said it.
Well, now is the time to start tweeting about #Copenhagen. Now is the time to get #Copenhagen to trend. And how about #Copenhagen #DoSomething?
What are you waiting for? A waterproof iPhone that you can use in the sea?
Thanks to
@paulseys for drawing my attention to a recent US article on who owns your online material. It’s a subject that I have occasionally talked about but have not yet been brave enough to commit my thoughts to text. Cowardice on my part but there you go!
The reason is that there is a legal answer and a real world answer and I am am not convinced that the two align very well.
Many employment contracts would suggest that the employer owns all intellectual property rights created by their employees. It was a standard clause in contracts that was much more relevant to days of yore when employees were not creating lots of content online in their own time. It made sense back then.
Now, of course, we are all churning out material like the proverbial infinite number of monkeys and we must be close to something resembling Shakespeare.
But the old rules still apply – and the chances are that your employer owns that material.
However, and this is the first reality check, what employer in the right minds is going to want the copyright to my tweets? Although, you can’t deny the inherent genius one of my recent offerings:
Let’s get back to some real twitter stuff! There are more Greggs bakeries in the UK than McDonald’s – 1,400 vs 1,200. 
) #fact
And here’s the bigger reality check, does any employer really want the potential relationship and reputation harm of trying to take material created by a former employee? As one friend of mine (who does not work at the same firm as me) put it, ‘Let them try it. I get social media and they’ll regret trying to take over any of my stuff’.
Of course, it also depends on who the creator of the piece is. If, for sake of argument, the writer is a lawyer and is writing in his capacity as a lawyer on lawyer time, his lawyer employer is going to want to keep the copyright. Seems fair enough. But again, do they really want it? I have written a number of articles as a lawyer for my lawyerly employers in former firms and they now have my name attached to articles that I wrote when I was there… but I’ve left! Does that help them? I’m not sure it does.
Now I write on here in my own capacity in my own time. I’m certainly not giving legal advice here – it’s more a statement of my experience of dealing with businesses. Would my employers want this material? I don’t know. They may want something a little more ‘lawyerly’ to put out in the firm’s name and that would be great.
These days, we build our own personal brand and we create our own material. For some, the ‘package’ that they as people represent is probably better thought of as ‘on loan’ to whoever they are working for at the time. While the legal reality is probably very different, in many ways enforcing it would create such a storm, you may be ill advised to try it.
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There seems to be a bit of controversy following the
Like Minds Conference in Exeter last Friday. I should, from the start, point out that I was one of the people on the stage as part of the panel discussion on building community.
During the event, one delegate questioned whether it had answered the key questions regarding measuring ROI derived from social media. There are, clearly, those who want a ‘formula’ approach to give some numerical answer.
The first and most effective answer had to be what was happening around us on Friday.
Like Minds was promoted and advertised solely using social media. On Friday, 200 people turned up to Exeter from across the country and another 600 tuned in online to watch the live feed. Now, maybe I am missing something but surely those people who were in the room or online were proof of concept. They provide us with measurable numbers.
But they do not tell us the whole story. Lots of people joined us via Twitter – we could not measure them. My co-host on
PhotoLegal,
Phill Price, was one of them – he was waiting for a haircut at the time but got involved and gave us a tweet. He interacted – which was the point of the day. Also, uber-tweeter,
Stephen Fry sent us a tweet with his good wishes for the event. People talked about the event before, during and answer. We can’t measure them. We reached people through coverage online and offline – we can’t measure them.
Amongst the ‘unanswered’ questions, so we are told, are:
• How to carry out online campaigns to compliment offline marketing mix
• How to target online audiences, and best engage current customers and new customers
• How to turn customers into brand advocates through social media
Now, we discussed a number of things, one of which was my own subject of the PhotoLegal social media phenomenon. Our online campaign led to offline coverage within industry publications. We indentified, engaged with and nurtured our online audience – actually, we have also showed them the ‘L’ word which
Daren Forsyth used and was so derided by some. They are our customers and brand advocates and they have become not only evangalists for the podcast but some have recommended me and my firm to their friends and contacts. They also go to my cohosts,
Darren Hector and
Phill Price for advice on photography issues. How would you measure the ‘feeling’ that they have towards us and that we have towards them? What would the answer be? 75.3? 26.1? What would it mean? What would it matter?
As someone who has also worked in the PR industry, I know that there are some things that cannot be empirically measured. Print adverts are one of them – you will never know how many people have seen your ad no matter what people say. Brand awareness is also incredibly difficult to measure as people sometimes guess as to whether they know a brand when asked – do you want to be the idiot that hasn’t heard of the latest website adhsadjhsdf.com? No? Then you answer ‘yes’ to the nice lady with the clipboard.
In my opinion, the desire to have ‘numbers’ to justify campaigns is lazy thinking – brand and issue campaigns can take months or even years to come to fruition – and attempting to measure them will prove pretty much impossible (although we could all find a polling agency that could come up with some questions for a fee!).
Sometimes, you need to step back and see and feel what is around you. Sometimes there are no numbers.
From a standing start, we put together a podcast and an ecosystem that has proved massively popular in its particular industry area. What are the percentages? No idea. Nor do I want to rely on numbers. Sure I know how many downloads we have had but it is much more interesting to know the influence we have when we go live and see people sit with us, online, listening, interacting, talking and promoting us without us even asking. It feels right. We have a relationship with our listeners – the best listeners in the world, by the way! When it doesn’t feel right any more, we will know and we will do something about it. We do not need numbers to tell us what is working and what does not.
Now, I know all this sounds a bit defensive and maybe it is. The Like Minds crew put together an amazing conference that proved the importance of social media. The speakers, especially
Trey Pennington,
Daren Forsyth and
Olivier Branchard, did address the ROI questions including why it is difficult to measure, why it may not be right to measure it in ‘traditional’ ways and what other indicators of success there may be.
The conference is now available online via the
Like Minds website, so you can decide for yourself. Go and watch it. See what this social media thing is all about and why using traditional methods to measure new media is about as relevant as putting petrol into a horse and cart.
>After years of blogging on other people’s sites, ghosting articles and the like, I have decided to ‘come out’ (in the blogging sense) and so, henceforth, reviews, comment and the rest of it will be here and on Twitter.
And, I’ll be guesting, as me, on Darren Hector’s excellent Wildlife Photographer podcast talking about legal things (and anything else he wants me to talk about). That’s going to be fab and I am very much looking forward to it.
And (you lucky people), I’m also trying to get together a merry band to do some sort of live blog or nearly live podcast from the Social Networking World Forum.
That live blog will happen in some form of another on here and on Twitter on Tuesday 10 March – so check back here or subscribe to my Twitter feed.
It is difficult to fully express the excitement that this is generating but imagine Christmas when you were about 5 and realised that you might be getting the garage set that you really wanted!
