I briefly touched on Facebook privacy issues in my last post, mentioning that I’d stripped all information out of my profile in response to my growing concerns about Facebook’s constant push to share more information publicly.
There are a lot of so-called “social media experts” out there. The truth is there is no such thing. The majority of “social media experts” are simply people with regularly updated twitter feeds, a lot of friends on facebook they don’t really know, constantly bombarding you with requests to “like” their public page, which if you…
If you live in the UK you can’t have failed to notice there’s an election going on. I say going on, because for the first time in a generation, it hasn’t produced a decisive result in terms of forming a government. But that’s not the only area of indecision. Before the results were in, even leading political bloggers such as Iain Dale were reporting that the internet played a minimal role in the campaign — in stark contrast to many social media, marketing and web experts (including myself) who were confident this would be the UK’s first “internet…
My car is a bit of an unsung hero. I drive a beat up old Mercedes W202, and I probably love that car more than I’ve ever loved any woman. She’s never let me down and she’s no plans to leave me for a richer man. She’s survived two crashes where lesser cars have perished. Having said that, she’s looking a little rough around the edges these days and probably can’t do any better than the handsome young copywriter she’s currently hitched to.
Anyway, between personal, family and business reasons, I’ve clocked up several thousand miles in her this month.…
I’ve posted before about the perils of twitter. Twitter is a bubble used by a relatively small community of people — particularly, for some reason, politicians and web designers. But in small bubbles, news travels fast. And if you get it wrong, you get the entire self-righteous community coming down on you, as they did recently with Jan Moir and AA Gill or, more noble-mindedly, over the Trafigura case.
But it’s the fact that Twitter is so immediate that makes it so dangerous. It’s like having a gun with no safety catch. If…
Back to politics again, but I think anyone can see the wider implications for social media in this new Prospect poll about who uses twitter. I’ll let the excellent Dizzy Thinks blog spell it out for you.
The most validatory statistic from the poll toward my view that Twitter ‘ain’t all that’, is that 76% of the British population said they’d never used Twitter and, also, had no intention to use it in the future. In other words, Twitter is a communication medium that encourages groupthink whilst simultaneously making the group believe their views…
ROI (return on investment) = (Payback – Investment) / Investment
It’s simple. Spend less money.
But hang on — if you spend less, won’t your payback fall too? Couldn’t your ROI actually fall if you stop spending money on social media marketing?
Of course it could. But that’s where most people are missing the point of social media. I don’t think there’s any specific correlation between the size of your investment in social media and the returns you get. Of course, if you spend more money putting your face out there, the chances are you’ll get…
I think it’s just a fact we’re going to have to live with. As soon as an idea gets co-opted by the advertising industry, people’s attitude toward it changes. In much the same way as I think the death-knell of Twitter was sounded by its adoption as a campaigning vehicle by the major political parties (how uncool is that?) so too is social media, in a wider sense, being corrupted by our efforts as advertisers to harness the buzz-generating power of a good viral campaign.
It’s inevitable. Most people see social media as a way of connecting with their friends.…
I found my way to DrinkTank earlier this week. It’s a networking event for new web startups in Covent Garden. Naturally, there was a lot of networking going on. I don’t network very well, to be honest — I prefer to talk to people one on one. ‘Elevator pitches’ tend to be forgotten thirty seconds after the thirty seconds they take to deliver. When you hear sixty in a night, no one person’s voice stands out from the crowd.
So I got talking. I didn’t go to pitch my services, rather I went to brush up on the latest developments…
No, not another post about why I don’t twitter. Although I would like to go over some of the things I said in my previous post. I write reasonably lengthy blogposts because providing keyword-rich, detailed, informative posts is the cornerstone of my SEO strategy. But it is good, from time to time, to keep it simple.
This post, linked to by Guido Fawkes simply as “Twitter Tsar Talks Tosh” on PR-media-blog.co.uk, sums up a lot about what’s right and wrong with Twitter. Skip to the end:
Labour is experimenting with different social media activities, including a way of
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I’ve said it before. I don’t have time to twitter. Twitter is, for me, a devalued communication mechanism — I find it too time-consuming to find the few pearls in amongst the slurry which, let’s face it, is plentiful. That doesn’t mean I don’t think Twitter is useful. Of course it is. It’s the number one way of attracting social media hits to a site, fast.
I like being twittered about. It brings hits to my site. But I don’t twitter about myself. Direct tweets, linking to your own material, are virtually worthless. They’re spam. They’re a flood. They’re a…