But I am not one to shy away from my mistakes.
I firmly believe that if we learn from our mistakes, we have gained, not lost.
Can you do the same?

Twitter #Fail

Several years ago I publicly pledged that I would never be using Twitter. I was in good company.

The UK’s leading political blogger, Guido Fawkes, was also convinced Twitter was a fad and, moreover, spoke to a closed audience of just 24% of the population — Twitter was too selective and by focusing on Twitter you were effectively concentrating on a platform that would never reach much of your desired audience. If (as was true at the time) 90% of Twitter users were overwhelmingly left-wing and urban, how would you reach Daily Mail Man, White Van Man, etc, in the suburbs?

In actual fact the platform became universally adopted and I’m more than happy to eat my own words and follow up with a slice of humble pie.

You can even follow me on Twitter.

Why I switched from Facebook to Twitter, and why it matters

Facebook was dead for me the day they forced everything on your profile to be linked to pages. List golfing in your list of activities? It links to the page.

I immediately deleted all data from my profile and now use it simply to keep in touch with people via private messaging. Twitter, on the other hand, has never claimed to be something it is not.

Twitter is a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin medium. You know it’s public. You know it’s always been public. You know it always will be public. The constantly shifting sands of privacy on Facebook became too much, so I left.

Yes, Facebook has millions and millions of users and is growing every day. But the way people use Facebook is different. People do not trust it. Facebook is the noisy “friend” you know is going to get drunk and spill your secrets one day. Facebook is the gossip you mind your tongue when you’re around.

Twitter is the office water cooler. You speak your mind, but you hold your tongue. It’s always been this way. Twitter won’t stab you in the back.

Until today, Google had the same level of trust. Will I stop using it? No. Will I use it in a different way? Yes. And that’s why it matters.

Today, Google are changing their privacy settings

Today, Google is making your life less private. Privacy changes mean Google is able to collect more data on you, store it for longer and, moreover, share it with more websites. The EU believes it violates privacy law.

It is without a doubt a bad thing for the consumer – a great thing for advertisers, in the short term at least.

I do not believe for one instant this is the beginning of the end for Google. All things being equal, they provide a fantastic service, for free, we all rely on.

But as Google stake their claim on more and more of our data, I find myself going to greater and greater lengths to hide it. I’ve ensured my web history is switched off. I clear my caches and clean cookies. I sign myself out of sites and I ensure I don’t get caught in web bubbles – a feedback loop where sites only show me search results they think I’ll agree with).

I am Spartacus

I’m just one man – and I don’t expect mass adoption of hyper-vigilant privacy settings. But all it would take would be a simple plugin to automate the process and I (and, based on the success of popular plugins such as Adblock, at least 10% of the web population) would install it.

If you are given a choice between a) losing your privacy and b) keeping it, you would naturally choose B.

When they change your privacy agreement, Google and Facebook and all the others are forcing you to choose “A” every time. Yes, it’s possible to roll back settings and circumvent changes, but most people simply don’t have the time or aren’t tech savvy enough to do this.

Any developer who comes up with an easy way to ensure total web privacy will gain mainstream traction very quickly. Adblock Plus, a service that’s never been advertised, has been downloaded by 20-30m users of Chrome and Firefox. So I’m not in a minority of one.

In short, don’t be evil, Google. If you try to collect more and more data from us, eventually you might end up collecting much less.

I won’t stop using the product. I’ll simply start using it differently. Join me.

Privacy matters.

*** Edit — a day after I wrote this blog post, Mozilla announced the launch of the free “collusion” add on which enables you to watch which companies are snooping on you as you browse. Great minds think alike… ***

Several tweets later, it was revealed to be a marketing ploy by Snickers: the celebrities tweeted ‘you’re not yourself when you’re hungry’.

The campaign was brilliant. The fact is few people really use social media well. Campaigns are needlessly complicated and convoluted, almost inevitably reflecting the number of people involved in writing them. Social media campaigns work best when they are kept simple.

I wrote some time ago about an offer at Pizza Express that required you to download and install a Facebook app and reserve your table through the app in order to qualify for a discount pizza. A mail-out flyer or coupon would have garnered more business. In the end I ate in a Prezzo which had a ‘buy one get one free’ offer displayed on a board outside.

Yes, yes, yes. Getting you to install an app is a great way to mine personal data, for now. It’s only a matter of time, once things like seeing increased prices once you’ve ‘liked’ something online, before the backlash starts — and people refuse to engage at all. But advertising has never been about complexity – nor has it been about treating the customer like an idiot. In the famous words of David Ogilvy, “The customer is not a moron, she is your wife.” Good campaigns are simple, direct, and most importantly of all — they speak at the same level as their audience.

Snickers’ social media campaign fulfilled all three criteria for a good campaign, social media or otherwise. Ultimately the best campaigns get people talking, and that’s exactly what Snickers managed to do.

So why are they being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority? Of course, it could be a little bit of cheeky on-the-side marketing (getting reported to the ASA is a great way of getting even more press for your campaign), but you have to wonder where-next-for-social-media (and celebrity) if a simple bait-and-switch campaign is declared illegal.

Send a few fake tongue-in-cheek tweets. Then tell everyone it was a joke, associate the joke with the brand.

A formula so simple a child could have created it. Yet they didn’t. It was the work of a fiendishly clever advertising brain. It takes a true genius to create a campaign so simple.

At no point did the campaign talk down to its audience. Any ‘deception’ was light hearted and extremely unlikely to cause offence.

Best of all, it wasn’t a transparent attempt at data mining, demanding ‘engagement’ with an app or a page without giving a great deal in return. It was simply good old fashioned word of mouth.

Here’s hoping to see many more campaigns like it in the future.

In other words, you’d imagine that Don is exactly the kind of customer who’d embrace Facebook Timeline with open arms. So much so, in fact, that one individual even mashed up one of Don’s famous pitches to create the Don Draper delivers Facebook Timeline pitch.

But like Peggy’s ‘relaxerciser’, this is one product that Don may be selling, but certainly won’t be buying. Why? Because Don is a man with a past. And he wants to keep it private.

**Spoilers ahead**

The man with no name wouldn't stand a chance against Facebook Timeline

In case you’ve been living under a rock (or you’re one of those crazy people who aren’t part of the Mad Men Cult), Don’s real name is Dick Whitman, and a little over a decade before the series starts a mix-up in the Army results in him being discharged under a new name — he effectively abandons his past and starts his life over again.

Over the course of the series, Don has dodged having his true identity discovered by everyone from junior executives to Federal Agents. But the chances are he couldn’t avoid Facebook Timeline, the new feature that makes it easy for people to read every status update, every relationship, every ‘key event’ in your entire life in just one or two clicks.

If you thought Googling your girlfriend was bad…

Once upon a time when you met a girl you asked your friends about her. Then, you googled her to see what you could find out — job, hobbies, you know, anything you could use to give you an edge. “Sure, I love collecting porcelain kitten figurines too! You have a website dedicated to them? No!”

Some people thought this was already too much. Then, along came Facebook. In many ways, adding someone on Facebook is the internet equivalent of getting to first base, only you share ideas instead of sticky saliva. You swap pictures. You can see each other’s hobbies. You start reading about what is happening in your new friend’s life.

What we haven’t been able to see until now is each other’s pasts.

Of course, this isn’t just about relationships. When we meet new friends, we add them to Facebook too. But up until this point, all we’ve known about each other is what we’ve chosen to share from that point.

With Facebook Timeline, everything is different. Now, when we add someone on Facebook, there will be an additional expectation.

We will instantly expect to know everything about a person’s past.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Even if you’re not Don Draper, you probably still have plenty to hide. (Hint: 76% of photos on facebook depict people who are drunk)

Let’s assume you joined Facebook early, in 2004-2006. You were probably still at uni, or at the very least weren’t aware of Facebook’s privacy implications. You certainly weren’t aware that friends you’ve just met in 2011, or 2021, or however long Facebook is still cool for, would be able to read everything you’ve said and done back in 2004.

The privacy implications are startling.

Let’s say next year you get a job in something dull — maybe as a sales executive somewhere. You’re a telephone jockey, struggling to meet your OTE. Work is your life, and it’s made more pleasant by having a few friends in the office. You go out for a few drinks. Maybe you flirt with one of them. They want to add you on Facebook. What do you do?

You joined Facebook in 2005. You were still in Uni. You smoked weed, or had some other disgusting habit you’ve since grown out of, like being active in questionable university politics. I have plenty of friends who were active in hard-left circles who have since gone on to work for major corporations. How embarrassing.

So here’s the dilemma. Do you refuse to add these people because you don’t want them to see your past? Or do you selectively edit your past, deleting the things that could harm your relationships in the present?

If you start deleting things from your past, will people feel you have ‘something to hide’?

Would you, like Don Draper, be missing a large chunk of your life? Would you create a fake past? Or would you have to suck it up and admit you’d been caught out.

But wait… what’s there to be caught out about?

It’s a fact. People change.

To borrow from dope-smoking Prime Minister David Cameron, people are entitled to keep their past lives private.

Until now, we’ve been able to keep facts about who we used to be a secret from people we know now. Why should your work colleagues at Goldman Sachs know you used to hand out Socialist Worker flyers? You’ve moved on.

In Season 4, Don Draper says:

“When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere, just ask him. If you listen, he’ll tell you how he got there. How he forgot where he was going, and that he woke up.”

The point is that friendships are enriched by slowly discovering things about a person — we are partly defined by our past and our present but also by our future — by our hopes and our aspirations.

Facebook Timeline may leave us all forever looking back on each other’s pasts.

If I meet you in 2011, or 2022, or 2100, it shouldn’t matter what I was doing in 2005. But Facebook Timeline encourages people to do just that.

When we meet new people, we decide what to tell them about our past.
We selectively edit our histories, we start each new friendship with a blank slate. Facebook Timeline removes that in one fell swoop.

Instead of starting each friendship anew, we’ll dive head first into other people’s pasts to find out exactly what kind of person they were 5 or 10 or 20 years ago. Eventually, checking up on people’s pasts will become the norm, and those without a past made public will be asked what they have to hide.

Facebook Timeline represents a paradigm shift in privacy – from the expectation of slowly learning about who a person is and where they came from as a friendship develops, to being able to find out instantly everything about their past life before you knew them. In short, it takes the fun out of being friends.

It’d certainly take the fun out of watching Mad Men.

But there is another way…

Introducing Don Draper, Twitter Fanatic

While editing my own Facebook Timeline to remove all questionable material (another problem: we selectively edit our pasts and are discouraged from sharing moments of failure, or where we have felt depressed or needed help) I noticed that since joining Twitter, I have hardly posted on Facebook at all.

I was late to the Twitter party. As a private person, I decided I never wanted to have an “open feed” of everything I was doing available to the public, so I resisted getting an account.

But because I joined in the full knowledge that everything I said was completely public, I have always had complete control over everything I share.

So if you’re a control freak like me, or you have a questionable past like Don Draper, Twitter is a better option if you simply can’t do without social media (Don would be fired on the spot by any agency these days if they found out he didn’t do social media, and so would I).

Twitter is a public forum, but for all that, it’s much more private. There’s no compulsion to share past history, and you know that everything you share is instantly public — there’s no sneaky changes to catch you off your guard.

With Twitter, you really can be anyone or anything. It’s all about what you say and what you share, not who you are and what you have done.

Facebook Timeline encourages us to look back on things we’d rather forget and places we will never be again – when we should be looking forward to the future.

Thanks, Facebook. But I don’t choose to share my past with you, or anyone else I’ve just met.

If anyone needs me, you can find me on Twitter.

Is sharing always a good thing? Do you think you got more pleasure out of that new toy when you played with it alone, or when you were forced to share it with others?

I ask because that’s exactly how Facebook works. Like a pushy parent, Facebook is forcing you to share more and more. And, perhaps inevitably, another tantrum has happened.

Facebook and Spotify force users to share intimate details of their lives

This time, it’s music. It’s bad enough that Spotify now forces you to sign up to its streaming music service with a Facebook account. Many people, myself included, naturally resist this attempt at data mining — they don’t want Zuckerberg knowing their every musical taste. I didn’t sign up (and pay money) to Spotify only for them to hand over my data to Facebook for free.

But the latest privacy outrage didn’t stop there. Once your Facebook and Spotify accounts were linked, an “auto sharing” feature was automatically enabled — with no ability to switch it off from within the Spotify app. In other words, all your Facebook friends could see every song you were playing in real time.

Obviously, most people saw this as too much. If I want (heaven forbid) to play Britney Spears at two in the morning on a Friday night, I certainly don’t want any of my friends to know about it. But the fact is we all have some guilty pleasures — we don’t want to share everything all of the time with everyone. Would you want to share with everyone on your friends list (who may or may not be ‘real’ friends) every meal you ate, every movie you watched or, even, every toilet visit you take?

It’s an old joke. But this cartoon from 2010 doesn’t seem to be so far off the mark. Facebook really is pushing us to share more and more — and many things, such as being forced to share the music we’re listening to, make us feel deeply uncomfortable.

You can opt out… but when did you opt in?

It took less than a week before Spotify were forced, by public outcry and drop-offs in usage, to give users a privacy option to prevent this over-sharing. I don’t want my Facebook “friends” to know every time I take a shit. And I don’t want them to know when I listen to “shit” music either.

There is such a thing as sharing too much — it’s okay to share when you want to,
but being forced to share is different — as Facebook and Spotify have found out.

Facebook’s new Timeline is almost upon us, and many people have argued that Facebook is getting too complicated [Mashable] for most casual users. It’s possible to prevent apps from automatically sharing information but it’s time consuming and complicated for most users. And there will always be the nagging feeling that the next time you log in to an app using Facebook, it sends data to your friends that you don’t want to make public.

Mashable have also highlighted three privacy fights the new timeline will bring – mostly to do with people from your present being easily able to dredge up things (or relationships) from your distant past, and hold the things you say against you. That’s quite difficult to do right now. The new timeline will enable your girlfriend, or your boss, to instantly find out what you were doing or saying five years ago.

Embarrassing photos from university? 4/20 status updates from before you wised up to the fact that only losers smoke pot? Hundreds of lovey-dovey messages from the ex who turned out to be a bunny boiler? They’re all back.

I’m not trying to be a luddite or a technophobe and I’m actually quite excited about some of the changes the new Facebook timeline will bring (as is, by the way, Don Draper). The idea of being able to share and curate a scrapbook of my life has appealed to ever since I got my first Livejournal over a decade ago.

But I want control over what, and when, I choose to share.

Spotify and Facebook didn’t slip up when they forced us into sharing the music we’re listening to.
That’s genuinely their vision of the future — a world where we share everything, all the time.

It’s not my vision of the future.

In George Orwell’s 1984, where our every move is monitored, Winston Smith’s interrogator says “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

Perhaps this is no longer the case. With Facebook’s timeline, perhaps a more likely vision of the future is six billion people flinging shit at each other for all eternity.

Facebook Turdline? Don’t joke. One day, it just might happen.

Tumblr started out a little like a cooler version of Twitter. I’ve often said that Twitter feels like a water cooler for us bored, lonely freelancers who don’t get to enjoy the simple pleasures of office gossip — well, Tumblr started out kind of like a hyper-specific water cooler for graphic designers, artists, and techie hipsters who mostly wanted to reblog each other’s cool designs. Some time between the year I joined and now, something changed.

Tumblr is indisputably the platform of choice for teenage (and slightly older) girls. I don’t know what the exact ratio of girls to boys on tumblr is, but one thing I can tell you is, unlike the rest of the internet, it isn’t a sausage fest. Heck, I actually went on a date with a girl I met on tumblr and she didn’t turn out to be a cave dweller or a social reject. In fact she was fairly typical of the friends I’ve made on tumblr. Young, pretty, urban, sophisticated, and very, very interested in fashion.

Okay, Tumblr isn’t quite as hipster as it used to be, but it’s still very cool. It’s full of young, affluent, fashionable people with lots of disposable income. That makes it a perfect place to  promote your brand — if it’s already fashionable, you’re already playing to a captive audience. If you’re looking to become more fashionable, tumblr  is the definitive social media platform with “fashionable” street cred. GQ is on Tumblr — and it’s as effortlessly cool as the magazine.

But how do you get it right? What’s the right way to promote your brand on Tumblr?

1. Stop trying to sell me something

Like all social media, if you out and out spam me with “buy this! subscribe to that! follow me! follow me! WHY WON’T YOU FOLLOW ME???” junk I will ignore you, block you, or report you. Fortunately, Tumblr is mostly free of that kind of crap — which is why we like it. And we’d like to keep it that way, please.

That’s especially true on tumblr, where the aim of the game is to share ideas and inspiration — very rarely original content. My tumblr is mostly full of the music I like, interspersed with a little bit of architecture and photography. I have a graphic designer friend who shows off her talent using her tumblr — but she never, ever hassles anyone to buy anything. She simply draws something, puts it up for free, and tells you you can buy a print, if you really want. If you’re a brand, you could learn a lot from her.

2. Inspire and be inspired

Sweet Home Style is a great example of a conversation happening online. People submit photos of their interior designs and other people follow. Sweet Home Style is such a popular tumblr it offers monthly sponsorship, without being intrusive. It relies on user generated content — in essence, it’s a forum where people come to share ideas — to inspire and be inspired. Even if you’re trying to sell your own products through Tumblr, your Tumblr shouldn’t just be about you — it should be about the things that inspire you and your readers. Tumblr is a medium that cries out for user generated content to be shared and enjoyed — so make the most of it.

3. Set the mood

I recently suggested to a brand that was lacking direction they could crowdsource what people thought of them visually by setting up a tumblr and asking subscribers to submit images, music, quotes etc that they thought evoked the mood of the brand. But on the whole, most brands know their image already — and a Tumblr is a great way to set the mood for your brand by posting images and ideas that fit your unique style. Do you run a burlesque night? Or are you an acid house promoter? You’ll want to post a lot of pictures of girls in corsets or old videos of 80s warehouse parties, then. Find out what your followers are into — and post things that will appeal to them and solidify your brand identity.

4. Make use of Tumblr’s unique features

I have a journalist / blogger / freelancer friend who works in fashion. She uses Tumblr to aggregate all of her blog posts from across several different sites into one place. The result? A much wider audience for her fashion journalism, as well as a quick and easy repository of all her work for potential future employers and commissions. Tumblr is so easy to use you can start posting in minutes — and it’s a much more versatile platform than Twitter. Think of it as a simpler, slightly cooler socially oriented version of WordPress crossed with Twitter — then think of all the possibilities a platform like that can give you.

The golden rule – Tumblr is a unique community.
Normal rules of social media don’t apply.

Tumblr is home to rampant image piracy and has more repeats than terrestrial television. Expect to see the same old blurry vintage effect photos with helvetica quotes stamped on them a lot. Expect to see fluffy kittens and teenage angst daily. But also expect to find a really solid community of people who care about each other and who aren’t afraid to speak their minds — a little like the good old days of Livejournal. Take it easy at first — Forget what you know from Facebook and Twitter. Tumblr has its own set of rules and etiquette, so don’t offend the natives. And don’t try to spam us or sell us crap.

People on Tumblr trust other people on Tumblr. It’s still a much smaller, friendlier place than Twitter or Facebook. That means brands who go there — and get it right — get a lot more respect, too.

It was an article about the ‘golden years’ of Livejournal that got me thinking. If you don’t remember Livejournal, it was more or less the first social blogging platform. Before Facebook, before Twitter, before Tumblr, before Blogspot and WordPress, it was a place where people met people from all across the world and shared stories — people they’d never met before.

It was an incredibly open place, and many of us in our late twenties and early thirties remember it fondly. I started my first livejournal in 1999 and it was there that I learned how to blog. But it was more than just that, though. It was a place where I met new people, many of whom I’m still friends with today.

In short, Livejournal was more than just an “online community”. It was supportive, open and honest. I felt more connected to some of my online friends than my “real” ones. In time, I met many of the people I’d met online. Sometimes we even travelled thousands of miles to meet up.

The truth is, I can’t imagine any of that happening now. I shared crazy things, like the first time I fell in love, wild nights out (believe it or not, my mis-spent adolescence was peppered with squat parties and raves, many of which I still remember with great fondness), as well as my hopes and dreams and fears. I can’t imagine sharing in that way with “strangers” on Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter, or on a WordPress blog like this.

The value of social media is low compared to "real-life" communication.

Livejournal had a knack of turning “strangers” into real friends, online and in real life. Other “social” mediums don’t seem to have the same effect. And I think I know why.

In the early days, Livejournal encouraged brutal honesty. It was before we’d learned to be guarded on the net — before we routinely googled new friends and potential partners, before employers started trawling Facebook for evidence of misdemeanours, in effect, before we realised we had to hide ourselves when we went online.

If anything, because we didn’t have to worry about what our “real” friends thought, we felt more able to be open and honest. And in time, that honesty was rewarded — we learned to trust each other online, and people became “real” friends.

Now, we spend less time being ourselves online, and more time behind our keyboards, trying to project a certain impression.

A colleague recently brought me to heel for swearing on my twitter feed, which is republished via my linkedin, which is apparently “unprofessional”. But, I replied, I swear all the time in real life. I’ve never sworn at a client, but to my friends and colleagues, I’m a real-life Malcolm Tucker. Do I stop swearing on Twitter? Do I become “less” like my real self?

To thine own self be true?

Yesterday, Mother London, an agency I have an immense amount of respect for, put the “Royal Corgis” in their agency “tweet seat” and proceeded to unleash a profanity-strewn tirade about the Royal Family for most of yesterday afternoon. And I thought: brilliant. In a sea of equal parts self-promotion and self-absorption, these guys are laughing their arses off and thumbing their noses at the establishment. The agency’s character came across online.

And that’s what most of us are failing to do. We’re so busy pretending to be a type of person online, we forget to project ourselves. And we come off as shallow and one dimensional. And that’s why we don’t genuinely connect with people via social media the way we connected in the good old days of Livejournal.

The answer? To take a “warts and all” approach to social media. Sure, it may not be professional to swear from time to time, or to share snaps of crazy nights out where clients can see them, or to mouth off if we’re having a bad day. But the fact is, it’s better to look like a real human being than a single minded sales robot.

After all, who’d want to employ someone who’s just a one dimensional character with no real life?

And so to politics. For some reason, it’s socially acceptable to tweet regularly about politics, even when it has nothing to do with your job. But I happen to think there’s a time and a place for politics: and it’s in the pub, or round the dinner table, not in the workplace.

Imagine if the guy you sat next to in your office interrupted your work every hour so he could tell you what he thought about the government. Chances are after the first day you’d tell him to shut the hell up, keep his goddamn opinons to himself, and get on with his work. Especially if you voted for the other party.

Sure, people who only tweet about their business are boring and dull. But then again, people who won’t stop talking politics are boring and dull, too. The difference is, if I tweet about my new watch, or about being kept awake by sex sounds coming from next door (I do!), it may not be work related — but it’s not going to offend anyone, either. Yet if I tweeted about yesterday’s budget, I guarantee you this — it would offend at least 50% of the people who read it.

In space, everyone can see you tweet.

Politics tends to be black and white. Trust me — I studied it for three years. That was enough to put me off for life. At the end of my degree, I declared “politics is economics for stupid people,” then went off and did another degree so I never had to hear people’s dumb political opinions ever again.

The point is, it’s easy to forget that for every person who agrees with your opinion about government cuts, or tax rises, there’s someone who disagrees. The problem is, that person might just be a client.

Of course, I have political views. And no, I’m not going to tell you what they are. For what it’s worth, I’ve never voted. And don’t ask me if I believe in democracy. If 51% of the population vote to kill, rape or imprison the other 49% — technically, that’s democracy. You’re welcome to it.

I’m proudly apolitical. But the fact is:

My political beliefs have no bearing on my work as a copywriter.

Whether I’m a bleeding heart liberal, a proto-fascist, a referendum nut, a euro-sceptic or a radical environmentalist, I’m still just a copywriter.

But my political beliefs might have a bearing on whether you hire me or not.

• For example, if you were a green party supporter, would you hire a person who consistently tweets in support of something you despise — for example, nuclear power?
• If you were a feminist, would you hire someone who joked about International Women’s Day?
  
• If you were an objectivist libertarian and, having seen a tweet about the importance of providing for the neediest people first, would you be afraid I’d renege on a contract because “some other client needed the work more than you did”?

My point is, unless you’re a politician, you have no business turning Twitter into your personal soapbox to give everyone your daily, or even hourly, political opinions.

Not everyone agrees — so why risk losing half your potential client base?

We all have political opinions — but they’re better kept out of the workplace, or within earshot of potential clients.

Try the pub. You’ll find just as many people willing to get into an argument with you, but if half of them think you’re an idiot, at least it’s only half a room full of people, not half of the entire world.

I suppose I should start at the start: with an explanation of exactly why you should be using social media. It doesn’t matter what you do: if your business in any way relies on web traffic, and, specifically, your organic page rank in Google, you need to be using social media.

Why? Because Google changed the rules.

I set up my own business as a freelance copywriter at around the time when core SEO strategy was to have a good site, with lots of keywords and information, and a regularly-updated, keyword rich blog that attracts lots and lots of inbound links. It’s still a solid strategy. But it’s no longer enough.

In December 2010, Google changed their minds and decided to use social media links as a signal to determine a site’s quality, and thus its page rank in organic search.

The effect is slim for now, but it represents a sea change in policy — social media links are only going to grow in prominence now the genie is out of the bottle. He’s not going back in. It’s no longer enough to produce good content and <i>hope</i> people share it. You’re going to have to actively manage your social media presence.

Adapt now before social media links gain more importance. Or risk your site losing page rank — and losing you business. Adapt or die.

I’ll be blogging my conclusions early next week, as well as writing a separate post about setting up a Facebook page for your business.

Until then, for anyone who’s interested, I kept a diary of my week — I guess this will only be of use to social media newbies and people with too much time on their hands, but if you’re interested in how I got on, read on!

Day 1.

Getting started with twitter

I swore I’d never use Twitter. But it was time to swallow my pride: Twitter had to become part of my core SEO strategy. I dusted down the account I’d created last year pre-emptively but never used. To my shock, people were occasionally trying to talk to me or share things with me on it.

Lesson number 1. I’d created the account simply as a placeholder to grab my username and future-proof myself. But if you have a social media account, don’t neglect it. People may be trying to talk to you on it.

At first I was bewildered. “Switch to the New Twitter,” I was told on logging in. I felt a bit like Monty Burns — “Hold on, meistro! There’s a new Mexico?” But it was easy to start following people I knew. Some of them even followed me back.

I added a mix of freelance copywriters, agencies I admire, and friends. It took me less than two hours to discover some information that interested me: the average daily pay for a middleweight freelance copywriter this year is £200 – £300, confirming that my daily rate of £200 was pretty much spot on — with room to raise my prices later in the year if I needed to, and still be competitive.

Facebook: Who needs a page anyway?

Facebook was harder I couldn’t find the page that let me set up a page. Eventually I googled it. I was given a bewildering array of options. Am I a brand? No, not really. What about a public figure? I wish. It seems vain, asking for “fans” — who cares?

I created the page anyway. But I didn’t know what to do with it. Useful information? It’s already all on my website. Cross post my blog entries? To who? No-one’s following me here. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out a use for the page. In a way that Twitter seemed instantly accessible and friendly to me, Facebook seemed pointless. Who wants to “interact with a brand” anyway? Not me.

I couldn’t bring myself to spam my modest personal friends list with a business request. 95% of my friends list have nothing to do with my business. They’re school friends, uni friends, people I met in the pub. They don’t care about Allday Creative. Why should I ask them to “like” my site?

At the end of day 1, my Facebook page was as it started. “0 people like this.” I go to bed a little downhearted.

Day 2

I’m actually really enjoying Twitter. But then again, following 20 people is easy. I see people who follow 6,000 people. Do they really have time to read it all?

The 140 character limit

The hardest part is getting used to saying what I want in 140 characters. Yes, as a copywriter I have to write short copy. But I’ll sometimes get a day to write a single sentence, if the sentence is important enough. This kind of brevity combined with speed is new to me. I have to sacrifice meaning for space.

For example:

A copywriter tweets a blog post about B2B cliches, with the word “solution” as his top cliche — something i’ve previously blogged about. I reply to him. But instead of saying it’s my “least favourite” word I say it’s my “most hated”. Which is stronger than I intended — but it fits in 160 characters. In other words, you really have to think extra hard about what you tweet.

LinkedIn

Still unsure what to do about my Facebook page, I turn my attention to LinkedIn. I quickly import my address book and found that 54 people I’d had contact with were on LinkedIn. I felt 12 of them were relevant to my business and added them all, along with a couple of friends who also worked in the creative industries. Within the hour, a third of them replied. My conclusion? If you like LinkedIn, you must really love it.

But after adding everyone I knew, I was stumped. I guess I just had to wait for the connections to roll in — to keep my page updated more regularly, to add people as I worked with them. Again, I was going back to rule number 1. If you have a social media page, keep it updated. I integrated my twitter feed into the page to keep it looking fresh. A definite improvement.

Day 3.

Too busy to tweet

On Day 3 I found what I’d feared most: I didn’t have enough time. Several client enquiries came in at the same time as a lot of work was due out. I spent 12 hours at the office. I barely had time to read my emails, let alone follow Twitter.

At the end of the day I’m exhausted, I’ve barely sent a tweet, and my facebook page still has 0 fans, something I promised I’d deal with today. I briefly wonder how some people have time to tweet hourly, every day — without it getting in the way of their jobs. I guess they’re just better at multitasking than me.

I also realise something else: when I’m working, I actually have very little to tweet about. I’m a quiet guy. I don’t feel the need for the world to know what I’m doing. My social-media-phobia is growing again.

Day 4

Facebook page is still languishing. 0 people like it. Can’t blame them – there’s nothing there. Realising I’m hopelessly out of my depth, I contact a marketing expert I did some copywriting work for recently. She agrees to help me with my Facebook problem when I’m a little less busy.

Ironically, I got to know her because she was one of the very few people who went out of her way to not just read my site, but also to communicate me and compliment me on my work on my private Facebook profile. I still don’t know what to do with my page, but I guess this is evidence that Facebook can work, used correctly.

Next lesson. Twitter and RSS go hand in hand.

I see a tweet from one of my favourite blogs, Copyblogger — they’re a bit repetitive sometimes but they’re always in the loop. I was planning to send out a few old-school sales letters (based on the Ogilvy technique) to some of my favourite companies to drum pu business. But someone on Copyblogger has beaten me to it, and now everyone else will be trying it. I probably would have spotted it on RSS. But the belt-and-braces approach may have saved my skin.

Twitter is definitely a distraction. At quarter to five I’m looking at funny tweets from Mother London and daydreaming about working there, rather than concentrating on the financial services brochure I’m supposed to be writing. I figure I’ve spent about an hour using social media today. At my hourly rate, that means today’s tweeting has cost me £25. I begin to wonder where my ROI is.

Day 5

ROI

My ROI arrives, in the form of a client enquiry — someone has seen a blog entry I’ve written thanks to Twitter. Of course, this was happening anyway — without my need to be active about it. People have always tweeted about and shared my posts without needing me to give them a nudge. But now I feel as if I have greater control. I can see who’s writing about me and find out more about them. And, of course, I can promote my own work. So long as I’m not constantly spamming people with things about me, which I’m not.

I tweet out a request for some help with some copy I’m writing: valentine’s day fortune cookies. I get one reply. It’s hardly huge, but it’s something. As week 1 draws to a close, I only have 19 followers – but I’m starting to see the potential ROI spending half an hour using social media a day will give me. Not to mention, hopefully, the organic search boost.

I’ll be going over my analytics later this month with a fine tooth comb and giving you all a detailed, useful report.

Finally, as the week draws to a close, I learn some big news, again, on Twitter — although I do more detailed research on RSS. Facebook is changing the way it handles pages to make them more like user profiles — getting around my problem of wanting to separate business and pleasure — at the moment, the only way I can convince someone to “like” my business is to use my personal profile to “like” theirs — something I’m not comfortable with as I like to keep my personal and business life separate. It’s big news — and another sign that like it or not, social media marketing is gaining in importance every single day.

1) half a dozen other people will be doing the same thing, and at least one of them will be doing it better than me, and
2) I’m not a “social media type”. I don’t tweet, I’m a reluctant user of Facebook, and my tumblr doesn’t have one single picture of a rebloggable kitten.

So I’ve decided to do something that follows the first rule of good blogging — I’m going to provide content that’s as unique as possible.

In honour of London Social Media Week, I’ve decided to dive in head first.

Eagle eyed readers may have noticed a new sidebar appear on the site overnight:

My aim is to actively use all three sites over the next 7 days to drive traffic to my site and secure new business.

When it comes to social media, there are two types of people. Either you’re an early adopter and you’ve been using it for years, in which case this blog post isn’t for you — although you might get a kick out of finding out how much I manage to get wrong — and how quickly I manage to learn from my mistakes. Or you’re like me:

The social-media-phobe – a description.

Chances are you’re on Facebook.

After all, everyone is. But you don’t use it. Not properly. You don’t “like” random people’s pages (especially business pages) and you don’t feel comfortable with Facebook mining your data. People have told you about the existence of this amazing game called Farmville and you’ve shaken your head and wondered if they’re feeble minded. You get angry when people “tag” you in photos. You’re probably only even on Facebook because someone you fancy is. You’re on Facebook, but you’re a Facebook-phobe.

You don’t “get” Twitter.

Supposedly 74% of people have no interest in using it, ever. You don’t see how friends and total strangers pinging you short messages in real time is a good thing. You find text messages annoying. You feel no particular need to update the world about what you’re doing. You see similar updates (“I’ve just farted in the bath lol”) on Facebook and you wonder why the hell anyone would ever want to do that. You read somewhere that Kim Kardashian was on Twitter. You see that as a good enough reason to never, ever go near the site.

Someone told you LinkedIn was really, really good for work.

It may have been your boss, or a colleague, or you may have read it on one of these new-fangled blogs. You may have even heard someone say “yeah, it’s like Facebook, only it doesn’t have Farmville or Mafia Wars or idiots” and you thought you’d check it out. You added a couple of your old co-workers and maybe you added someone you met at a networking event you really wanted to work for.Then that’s it. Your LinkedIn page languishes, unchecked, because no-one you fancy is on it so unlike Facebook, you never log on.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest this describes about 50% of you.

It’s a pretty accurate summary of my attitudes to Social Media — and I work on the web. It’s not just me. I know designers and devs, marketing consultants and other copywriters who are all based on the web who have the same attitude. We just don’t “get” social media. We’re too busy doing our actual jobs — whether that’s programming or designing or writing.

So, over the next week I am going to:

• Set up a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and dive head-first into LinkedIn.
• Try different techniques to attract fans, followers and drive traffic to my site
• Write a diary about my exploits — so I can show you what I get right and what I get wrong, with the metrics to prove it.

This is my Social Media Week challenge. I’m open to suggestions in the comments section about what I should be doing, who I should be following, what advice I need to be reading.

In the meantime, you can also follow me on Twitter, view my newly created Facebook page, or add me on LinkedIn.

I’m a big Scott Walker fan. Scott’s a cult singer who started out as a 60s pop crooner who gradually evolved into an experimental noisemaker by way of the dark, lyrical lounge music of Jacques Brel. Imagine if Frank Sinatra got a gig in Vegas and went from playing crowd pleasers to crooning deep numbers about call girls, death and torture, before finally just deciding to pummel a side of meat for seven minutes (Scott actually does this on his latest album).

But love him or hate him, Scott makes music that makes you think about other people. His early work was “rediscovered” in the 80s with the release of a compilation album called “Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker,” compiled by Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes.

The title is taken from the song “Big Louise,” a song about a lonely woman growing old alone, because her friends, and her lover, have moved on without her.

But enough talk. Just listen:

What the heck has “Big Louise” got to do with social media?

Big Louise is a song about a woman who’s sad and alone because “the world’s passed her by.”
But there’s that chorus: “in a world filled with friends, you lose your way.”

Those two sentences sum up everything that’s great, and terrible, about social media.

I said two years ago that I would never use Twitter. Why? Well, to sum up:

1. Running my own business makes me very time-poor.
2. I’m very prone to distraction (not good when you’re trying to concentrate),
3. It’s too easy to make a fool out of yourself in public. Tweet in haste, repent at leisure.
4. I’m actually a very private person.

Sometimes, I feel like Big Louise. Lonely. Like everyone else is having fun, and I’m staring down at them from a very long way away. When I’m out at mixers and I tell people what I do, they’re frequently astonished I don’t use twitter, I don’t have a Facebook fan page, and I’ve never “liked” anything because (depending on how many drinks I’ve had) “it’s nobody else’s f$%@ing business” what I like.

I’ve started to wonder if my reticence to go down the self-promotion route is hurting my business. Other people use twitter to interact with a meaningful community of peers and potential clients — I don’t.

I’m like the aloof girl at the party who stands in the corner, looking too cool for school. “I’m so good, you’ll come to me, baby.” And a lot of clients do. But how many more don’t?

Meanwhile everyone else on Twitter is standing round the punch bowl, slapping each other on the back, exchanging contact details, and generally having a whale of a time.

But the truth is I’m not a back-slapping, punchbowl kind of guy. I value longer, more meaningful exchanges with a smaller number of people. If I had a penpal, I’d rather write them a letter a week than exchange twenty 160 character messages.

And I just don’t have the time to follow a thousand people on Twitter and be talking to them all the time. I’ve got a business to run.

There’s the dilemma. Either don’t use social media and, like Big Louise, watch the world pass you by. Or spend all your time using social media and “lose your way”.

Professor Sherry Turkle of MIT recently claimed “Twitter and Facebook are driving us mad.” She said:

“We’re using inanimate objects to convince ourselves that even when we’re alone, we feel together. And then when we are with each other, we put ourselves in situations where we feel alone – constantly on our mobile devices.”

When everyone else is constantly tweeting, liking, facebooking and instant-messaging, the temptation is to join in — or be left behind.

Obviously, other freelancers manage to keep their social media profiles updated regularly and tweet hourly. I know I should be spending more time looking after my social media presence, but I’ve been so busy with work I simply haven’t had the time. But I think my reticence to tweet, to have a facebook fan page, to “like” things in the hope of getting a “like” back is the same as Professor Turkle’s. I’m worried that the technology diminishes us: in Scott Walker’s words, makes us “lose our way.”

Is there a happy medium?

Should I be tweeting once a day? Is it possible to tweet “once a day” or even just once an hour, and not get drawn into tweeting more? Am I “missing out on important networking opportunities” or would I lose clients because they see me tweeting when they’re paying me to be working?

And can social media really replace real-life networking? It’s London Social Media Week next week. Even social media experts still feel the need to “network”.

I’m doing quite well at the moment and considering taking on an intern, with a view to making them a permanent member of staff if the move pays off. The first thing I’m going to ask applicants is: are you good at social media? Because the truth is if you don’t have time for it, you’re better off finding someone who does than trying to do it yourself, half-heartedly.

Don’t let the world pass you by.

I hate to break it to you, folks — but social media isn’t social. “Social media” is a buzzword. “Social” is something that really happens, really takes place in real time. It’s social to go out for a drink or a meal with friends. It’s social to call someone up on the phone and see how they’re doing. It’s social to have a kick around in the park with your friends on a Saturday or go bowling in the evening. And if you can’t tell the difference between that and an instant message I feel very sorry for you.

Facebook: like having real friends, only not as good.

I bring this up because I’ve recently started using Facebook again, after an absence of almost an entire year. I still keep a clean profile – you can’t see pictures of me or find out what my hobbies are. If you know me, you already know what I enjoy doing. Facebook’s advertisers don’t need to know that as well. No — I started using Facebook as a quick, convenient way to interact with friends because I felt I didn’t have time to call or go out for a drink. The result? My life got less social, not more.

It’s easier to reply to a status update than it is to go and see a person. It’s easier to look at a photo of their new haircut and “like” it than to go out and see them and compliment them for real (or lie through gritted teeth!). But is it as rewarding? The answer, definitely, is no.

The final straw came when I got an email from a friend’s work account today. “Sorry I didn’t get your facebook message about meeting up – how about next week?” Of course, I’d sent the message a month ago. In the intervening 28 days, I’d gone from thinking “he’s probably busy” to “I’ve horribly offended him somehow.” And I was wrong.

An hour apart. Or a month?

We both live in London. It would take me a little over an hour to walk from London Bridge to his place in the East End. It would probably take me less than 30 seconds to pick up my phone and dial it. Facebook took 28 days. And that’s supposed to be social?

I didn’t follow up my “fancy a pint?” message because I assumed it’d be rude to scream “WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME??!?!” in a follow up message. Not that it would have done me any good anyway. But with the launch of Facebook Email, I kind of wonder. Have we finally hit the point of information overload — where the number of channels of communication actually hinder communication rather than enhance it?

Too many cooks spoil the broth

My friend is big on Twitter. In fact, he recently wrote an article in a national magazine about Twitter. Personally, I can’t get into it. But I do have a facebook, a tumblr, a livejournal account, a website and a blog (two blogs, actually). To add to that I could also have a MySpace, a Bebo, a Foursquare and countless other things, as well as a phone, email, text messaging, MSN, AIM, iChat and Skype. To make things even harder, I have a mobile number and a landline. I also have a personal email address and a business email address. And let’s not even get started on my actual address (at the moment, it’s London Bridge).

I chose to ping my friend a message on Facebook (oh wait, there’s one I forgot – Ping. Because we really, really, really needed more ways of sharing our tastes with the world. Thanks Apple.) because I figured ‘email for work,’ facebook for quick email-style messages to your actual friends — seemed like the right tool for the job, yet it wasn’t. And so we didn’t catch up for an entire month.

Social? Hardly.

I won’t deny that social media is in vogue, with a new startup practically every day. I love Tumblr. My friend loves Twitter. And taken separately, they’re all great ways for advertisers and brands to reach target demographics because, well, setting up a facebook page for your brand is much easier than dropping half a million on an ad campaign for the same reason that it’s easier to send a quick reply to a status update than it is to meet up down the pub. But the value of that interaction is significantly reduced. Think of the best facebook status update you’ve ever seen. Then think of the most creative advert you’ve ever seen. Which is more memorable?

A phone call, a text message, or an email to my blackberry is the only sure-fire way to reach me and ensure a same-day response – leading me to ask the question – what is the point of all this “social” media?

If social media has an ROI, it’s probably very low, even if your spend is low too.

Undeniably social media offers up an easier way for brands to interact with customers — but it’s the equivalent of offering fast food, not a gourmet meal. Yes, it’s one channel you ignore at your peril. But you’d be a complete idiot to drop all your other advertising spend and concentrate solely on social media.

I’m not the first person to notice that the more technology we have, the less fulfilled we are (I’ll leave that honour to the Unabomber). But normal, non-terrorist folks are waking up to the fact that too much can be, well, too much. I’ve always rated Brendan Cooper as a social media expert who actually knows what he’s talking about.

And what he’s saying is “don’t bother”. Why? Because you’re already too busy.

Can good search engine results be crowdsourced? Bing seems to think so.

If search goes social, everything changes. Facebook and Bing plan to integrate “like” data from Facebook — for now, as a separate entity — but what does this really mean? Position on search engines is part of a weighted algorithm — keywords from your copy make up part of it, as do your <title> and <h1> tags, the nature and quality of inbound links. If ‘like’ data is one day integrated into actual search results — how much difference will it make?

Social media integration would give an advantage to big business.

Companies with pre-existing social media campaigns will have an instant head start. They’ll have Facebook pages that are widely viewed and shared. They’ll already have ‘like’ integration on their pages and blog posts. Big businesses will also have an advantage — because good social media campaigns cost money while SEO is more or less open to anyone who can read a few easy start guides. The fact is, if you’re a small business, your Facebook page with a hundred and seventy or so friends won’t be able to compete. And the chances are you don’t have a Facebook page at all. After all, until now, it’s probably contributed very little to your business. Big brands need the simulated ‘conversation’ provided by social media. If you’re a small business, you’re probably on first name terms with most of your customers. Why bother with social media at all?

Bigger brands get talked about more. That makes them more powerful. What can you do?

Well, if ‘like’ integration goes ahead you’re going to be playing a game of catch up, and bigger brands will be much more powerful than you. It’ll mean more work and could see your SEO strategy being relegated to yesterday’s news. How can you as a small business hope to get thousands and thousands of ‘likes’ except by playing to the lowest common denominator? Will Facebook like integration doom us to an eternity of memes and Lolcats?

It’s going to be an uphill struggle that makes the power of crowds — and the tyranny of the majority — much more important in the grander scheme of your search engine strategy. You may be reduced to chasing ‘likes’ rather than producing quality content.

Relax – it hasn’t happened yet.

Of course, Bing hasn’t moved towards ‘integrated’ social media search results — yet. The information is presented separately, showing you what people in your social circle have ‘liked’. And even if social media data one day becomes integrated, it may be weighted far less highly than actual content. But the truth is, we just don’t know.

Content is indisputably king — it’s content, not design, that makes the web useful. But if social media data starts becoming more important and search results are increasingly crowdsourced from the majority, things like a novelty design or a ‘funny’ joke may end up attracting more likes than a site that’s actually got good content.

Will people really like ‘liked by’ searches? Will it provide higher quality results?

It’ll be interesting to see how ‘liked by’ searches are taken up by the majority. Will it provide them with more reliable results or will it churn out a sea of irrelevant results? Many social media strategists will see this as an opportunity, while still many more webmasters will greet this news with dismay.

One thing that’s definite is that social media strategy is becoming increasingly important. SEO is still vital, but it’s time to start looking to the future — and the future is, at least in part, social.

It’s impossible to avoid being bombarded with advertising in London. As a copywriter working in London, it’s even harder to not stop and take notice. Like a surgeon holding his knife like a scalpel and listlessly cutting into his Sunday roast, it’s hard for a copywriter to avoid dissecting other people’s work.

I see thousands of posters every morning. Sometimes the copy is good, sometimes it’s very bad. Sometimes it’s short and sometimes it’s long. Sometimes, I’m only looking at an idea, three words, and a very good design. Whatever the ad, I judge it by the simplest and most obvious criterion: how memorable is it?

Is being memorable the sign of good advertising?

Take this advert for example: it’s a simple, almost simplistic poster ad advertising boohoo.com, an online clothes store:

I think it’s effective. Why? Because it’s simple, memorable and innovative.

Whether or not you agree the use of ‘OMG’ should ever cross over from the internet, whether or not you like the kooky smile on the face of the model, whether or not you like the poster’s basic design… it’s memorable.

So I’ve always imagined it’s a good advert. But I was on my way out with two girls in their early 20s last night and on seeing the poster they struck up a conversation. They both hated the ad. They thought it looked cheap and tacky and made the clothes look rubbish. They both claimed they ‘wouldn’t be seen dead in anything like that.’

‘Maybe you’re not the target market,’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps you’d be happier in a boutique or shopping at Selfridge’s.’

‘But we are,’ they both argued: they both bought clothes online. So was the ad a failure?

I waited five minutes until the conversation moved on a little. ‘That ad,’ I said. ‘Can either of you remember what it was for?’

‘Boohoo.com!’ they both said in unison. Then one of them added ‘boohoo I bought those awful clothes!’ They both laughed.

But by my standard judgement — is it memorable? the advert was clearly effective.

Conversion or conversation? Which is the better metric?

It’s easier to judge effectiveness once you’re on the web. You can see exactly how many people visit your site, you can work out how many of them buy your products — in short, you can see how many people your site is converting. You can do the same thing in real life with sales figures, but let’s stick to the web for a moment.

It’s said that social media is all about conversation. Well, I just gave you an example of a real life conversation that didn’t involve Twitter or a Facebook Wall — conversation the old fashioned way. Yet it didn’t apparently result in a conversion. So what’s the benefit?

Well, clearly the two girls remembered the name of the site. That may make them more likely to visit it anyway, even if they don’t like the ad campaign. Moreover, the old maxim — there’s no such thing as bad publicity generally holds true. Getting people talking about your brand, increasing brand awareness, is almost always a good thing. The more people talking about you, the more advertising you’re getting for free.

Conclusion: conversation can be measured.

It’s a bit of a buzz-word, but ‘buzz monitoring’ is much more possible now in the era of social media. Whereas before companies had to guess how effective their word of mouth campaigns were being, now you can see online who’s talking about you on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The important thing to remember is that conversations don’t necessarily have a direct or rapid impact on your conversion rate. The fact that people are talking about you is (unless your ad is disastrously bad) almost always good. And even then, it can be-so-bad-it’s-good. The point is it gets people talking. The boohoo.com ad sticks in people’s minds and gets them talking, therefore by my definition, it’s a good ad.

It’s a rule of thumb that holds true 90% of the time: the bigger the brand, the more it sells. Creating conversation, therefore, is always valuable.

The random-pullquote-generator site What the F**k is my Social Media Strategy blows the Nathan Barley types spouting buzzwords out of the water. It’s a simple site, generating random quotes to do with social media using all the buzzwords we’ve become familiar with over recent years. Here’s a few choice quotes it gave me:

• “Build loyalty & increased engagement through ongoing conversation and brand experience”
• “Expose new and relevant communities to the brand by providing assets to encourage brand evangelism”
• “Amplify word of mouth by motivating influencers”
• “Utilise social currency to amplify experiences and drive conversations”

Let me guess. You’ve heard these before, right? That’s because Social Media has become a big industry with its own buzzword-sprouting language all about ‘engagement’ and ‘evangelism’ and all the other words you’ve heard before.

This brilliant, simple site has more or less torn every social media ‘expert’ a new one by stating what, for many of us, has been blatantly obvious for a long time. Social media isn’t about “engaging with brands,” it’s about people talking to people. Sure, you can influence people’s purchasing decisions and make a name for yourself with a good viral campaign (the Old Spice viral springs immediately to mind), but the fact is, most people trying to monetize social media are barking up the wrong tree. No, put simply, they’re just barking.

Marc Brownstein over at Advertising Age gets it spot on. Over-reliance on social media will damage your brand. Why?

Social media belongs in the media mix. But it shouldn’t be the entire mix. How will customers find you? Why should they care about your product/service? What are you going to do when your competitors crank up their promotional spend and start taking your customers? This message is simple — the short-term delight of not spending any media dollars on advertising will surely have a long-term effect: brand erosion.

Marc’s point is a simple one. Social media marketing is popular because it’s cheap. Instead of spending millions advertising your brand, get your customers to do it for you. But the fact is, that isn’t what social media is all about. To use a buzzword, it’s all about engagement. It’s about brands actually listening to what their customers want, and responding to those demands. It’s not another “push” medium ripe for “monetization”. It’s an opportunity to talk face-to-face. In the long run, that’s the only way to make social media work — as dialogue. The fact is, if you’re marketing, if you’re trying to attract new customers, you’re better off spending your dollars elsewhere.

Social media works, but only if you engage with people on their level — as equals, as voices — not as target audiences and “brand evangelists”.

The message of What the F**k is my Social Media Strategy is clear. Stop talking shit about social media. Start talking to your customers, and start learning what they want.

So how does it work?

Well, it’s a little like reverse SEO. Where a page or a comment can’t be deleted, it can be buried. SEO tactics can be used to push positive news stories higher up the page and negative stories lower down. For $15 a month, apparently, a company called Reputation Defender will “clean up and monitor your internet reputation.” For $30, “you can subscribe to a service that will try to destroy hostile internet content.” — whatever that means.

The fact is it’s pretty hard to cover up your online presence. That’s why so many professional people are worried. If you’re a newly qualified lawyer, the last thing you want is the photos of your party days five or six years ago from Facebook turning up in a Google image search.

Google yourself.

It’s a lot easier to bury bad news than it is to eradicate it. For example, a quick search of “Alastaire Allday” on Google brings you back to mostly the same place: my site, or links to one or the other. Because my site is modern, well-known and regularly updated, Google seems to have practically forgotten that I was once a journalist writing some fairly controversial articles for minor-league publications in an attempt to get noticed. Perhaps not the best thing for my reputation now — but an important part of my past nonetheless.

What else does Google bring up? Well, the only ‘personal’ result on page 1 is a blog post on a friend’s feminist blog. The next personal result is on Page 2, a letter to The Times I wrote some years ago about law and order — but since I wear my politics on my sleeve anyway I’m not too worried. Besides, before you get to that, you have to wade through a blizzard of information about my career as a copywriter, including my profile on the awesome Modern Copywriter blog.

In short, I’m not worried about my online reputation. I’ve been careful not to be photographed doing funny things (very often), my Facebook profile is clean, and my reputation intact.

But what do you do if you don’t have such a great reputation?

It seems to me the answer is clear:

• You should have your own personal website, including your name, so you can make sure your personal brand is the first thing people see and click on.
• Blog regularly, so people have an instant idea about you. You can learn a lot from the way people write, and what they write about.
• Make sure your social media profiles are clean, accurate and noticed by Google. My LinkedIn, for example, is the second result on Google for my name. Worried about dodgy photos? Why not set up a flickr in your name promoting the good side of your life.

In other words, if you can’t hide the bad stuff, make sure the good stuff gets found first. An employer is far more likely to forgive a bad facebook photo if they’ve already seem your impressive portfolio first.

If you’re a business, big or small, all this is still true, in fact, even more so. What business these days doesn’t have a website? And it’s definitely worth paying a reputation manager, or SEO expert, to make sure the right results come first.  No matter how small your business, you need good publicity.

Can a copywriter help? Yes. The better written something is, the more likely it is to get found, or be linked to. Why not employ a professional to write positive news stories about you?

Remember, most people don’t search past the first page on Google.
But don’t forget, it’s harder to destroy information on the internet than bury it.
The internet has a long memory.

The best way of keeping a clean reputation is to not get in trouble in the first place.

Good luck hiding those photos, folks.

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 do will lead to further bombardment in an attempt to monetize your engagement with them. They’re not experts. They’re idiots.

Social media works when it delivers a service. It works when it connects people together. People are generally less interested in “connecting with brands” than they are with their friends. Advertisers are interested in connecting people with brands. There’s a difference.

I wrote some time ago that the drive towards monetizing social media was “killing the goose that lays the golden egg“. And it seems as if my prediction is starting to come true. Prominent people are deleting their facebook pages. Privacy groups and data protection watchdogs are expressing extreme concern about the way people’s privacy concerns are being ignored.

Jason Calacanis sums it up simply:

Facebook is officially “out,” as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are–simply put–not trustworthy.

The key to social media is trust.

When trust breaks down, people move away from your brand. Calacanis links to dozens of news articles this week all expressing a lack of trust with Facebook, citing privacy concerns. Calacanis says Facebook have spent too much time looking at how much they can potentially earn from exploiting users’ data and not enough time thinking about how much they could lose if they go down this path.

People don’t like being a target demographic.

People don’t like “hard sell” tactics. When you bombard me with requests to “like” your company, it’s as annoying as being bombarded with cold calls trying to get me to buy stuff I don’t want.

Social media is beginning to feel less like “a way to connect with friends and family” and more like a way for advertisers to target you, learn more about you, and use that information to sell to you — in other words, manipulate you.

That might not be the language of a social media “expert” – but it’s certainly what a lot of ordinary people think. When I read articles using language such as “Facebook Pages switched from “Become a Fan” to “Like” in order to lower the bar for users to engage and connect with brands” it becomes glaringly obvious that social media is becoming a hard sell — and will increasingly be rejected by users.

People don’t want to “connect with brands.” They want to connect with people. Social media is only successful when it engages individuals, groups and communities at this level.

The golden rule of advertising:

Don’t treat people like idiots.

Anyone who does is destined to fail.

Stop looking for ways to monetize social media.

Start looking for ways to genuinely connect with your customers.

Or you, too, will be destined to fail.

Last week, it was widely assumed that television was the defining factor in the campaign — with the first ever televised debates giving the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third party, a substantial campaign boost. But that didn’t happen, either. Although “Cleggmania” saw Nick Clegg and his party gain a brief poll boost, they actually lost seats on the night. So if social media didn’t win it, it doesn’t look like television won it, either.

Social media brought very little to the campaign.

Antony Calvert’s Obama-style internet led fundraising drive, while interesting, failed to unseat the Labour incumbent, Ed Balls. But moreover The Sunlight Centre’s extremely negative online attack video, heavily publicized on local news websites with paid-for ads, failed to make an impact either.

Facebook Privacy Concerns

In fact, the only really surprising news was when Facebook put its foot in it again with a colossal breach of privacy –  encouraging facebook users to take part in a poll which showed their friends who they voted for — a massive faux pas in a democracy where the right to a secret ballot is sacrosanct.

I’ve become so concerned about Facebook privacy breaches of late I’ve stripped all information out of my profile — Facebook’s constant push to share more data publicly has gone way beyond what’s acceptable to me and this latest example of a cavalier attitude to privacy has only confirmed my concerns.

So where did it all go wrong for the web — and social media?

There’s a great analysis of how the internet affected the General Election here, from one of the BBC’s tech bloggers. He argues that social media played an important part, noting that “A YouGov survey found that a quarter of 18-24-year-olds had commented on politics via social networks.”

But there was no killer blow.

In fact, for me, the only really interesting internet news is that Guido Fawkes, arguably Britain’s leading political blogger, has finally switched allegiances and come out in favour of using Twitter — although he has railed against how it’s not a representative sample of the population at large.

I’ve held off using Twitter to market myself because I haven’t managed to find a use for it that benefits my customers / readers rather than merely advertises me — and I’m a firm believer that my marketing should provide value to customers, rather than merely push advertising / marketing on them — this blog, for example, aims to provide information rather than just sell my services.

I may have to re-think my marketing strategy in the light of one of Britain’s leading bloggers switching sides. But I’ve no intention of spamming you with ads or spending my life updating you on the minutiae of my life. I may start a twitter feed linking you to what I’m reading every day. Then again, I may find something more useful to do with my time. Like, say, work!

It’s been a bad election for social media. It hasn’t been a great election for television, either. It seems that old fashioned word of mouth and door-to-door campaigning have been the most important ways of communicating. That’s something every so-called “social media expert” should be paying attention to.

Social media isn’t the silver bullet many marketers claim it is.

It may improve campaigns, but it hasn’t replaced old-fashioned offline campaigns

…yet.

Anyway, between personal, family and business reasons, I’ve clocked up several thousand miles in her this month. As I scraped another pothole, I said to my passenger, “we’ve really got to stop and put some air in these tyres.”

You can’t charge for fresh air.

My friend said “it’s twenty pence at Tesco to use the air machine now.” So I drove another mile to the next petrol station. While I was there I filled the tank. A transaction putting two hundred times more than twenty pence in the petrol station’s coffers.

The point of my anecdote?

Some things are better off given away for free. By trying to charge me a nominal sum for something that’s effectively free elsewhere, they lost out on a much more valuable transaction.

Information is a little like air.

Sure, you can charge for it. But the chances are, unless you’re a university professor, you don’t make your living out of it. The chances are you know a lot about what you do. If you’re a baker, I bet you know some great cake recipes. But you don’t make a living selling the recipes. You make a living selling cakes.

That’s why a blog is a great place to give away information and get people interested in what you’re really selling. It seems like common sense, but it still amazes me how many people aren’t interested in giving out information. They want their blog to be a sales pitch. It isn’t. Or else they want to charge for the content. Why? It’s the internet. Sooner or later, you’ll find the information you’re looking for. For free.

The blogs I read the most very rarely tout for business. They’re the air pumps at the petrol station. They’re a service given away for free.

Sound pretty basic to you? It is. But it’s amazing how many people still don’t blog regularly. Here’s a few good reasons to blog:

• People will be more likely to recognise your authority on your subject. Give away great recipes to try at home? Then people are going to be more likely to think you bake great cakes.
• The personal touch. The internet can seem pretty impersonal. By blogging regularly, you’re letting potential customers get to know you better, increasing the chances of a conversion or a sale. Your blog should never be dry. Your blog should convey you as well as your ideas.
• Keywords, keywords, keywords. The more you blog about things relevant to your business, the more keyword-rich pages you’ll have showing up in Google. Update your blog once a week and in six weeks you’ve doubled the size of a six page portfolio site.
• Traffic. If you write well enough, people will keep on coming back. More than that, you can use your blog as a place to test out new ideas about your business. For example, I recently asked my readers if they thought I should be on Twitter. They didn’t. So I’m not.

But, you say… “I just don’t like the idea of giving away something for free! It’s a lot of hard work and I’m still not convinced I’ll get anything out of it.”

Most people are stuck in the real-world mindset that something-for-nothing is a bad deal. On the internet, it’s the only deal.

It’s why pay-walls around traditional newspaper sites never work. Like my earlier example, I’ll drive an extra mile to avoid the very small charge — and end up spending a lot more elsewhere.

Draw people in with your blog. You don’t need to sell them something directly.

Your blog is the biggest and best publicity tool in your arsenal.

It’s the best marketing strategy you’ve got.

You should be updating it more.

]]> http://allday.cc/blog/whats-the-point-of-blogging/feed/ 3 http://allday.cc/blog/caught-red-handed-how-not-to-use-twitter/ http://allday.cc/blog/caught-red-handed-how-not-to-use-twitter/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:03:35 +0000 al http://allday.cc/?p=629 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 you hold it in your hand, …

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 are having influence on a wider population when in fact they’re all just shouting at each other in a locked and sound-proof room.

If 3/4 of the population aren’t using it, and have no intention of using it, it’s a severely limited medium. Sure, it’s great at getting in touch with that 1/4 of the population. But only a fool would put it at the heart of their marketing strategy. When you rely on twitter to do your marketing for you, you’re broadcasting only to a limited number of people with limited appeal. As Dizzy puts it, ‘a locked and soundproof room’.

The prospect poll shows that most twitter users are left leaning liberals. What would a more detailed survey show? That they were more likely to be vegetarians, that they were against nuclear power? That they were more likely to be anti-capitalist hippies? Probably not. But Twitter only reaches a certain type of person. Personally, I think it’s great for tech launches and reaching people who work within the technology / online industries. But that’s as far as it goes.

Because nobody else uses it.

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 noticed more. But it’s just that — a chance.

So what you need to do is find a way of spending less while still getting the same returns.

It’s difficult to measure social media ROI. But one thing’s for certain:

Increasing your chance of getting noticed isn’t the same as increasing your social media marketing spend. There is little to no correlation between the two.

Social media acts differently to traditional advertising mechanisms in that you, yourself, aren’t doing most of the marketing. What’s more important to you? That you have a regularly updated twitter feed or facebook page, or that you have a thousand followers? You can pay someone to regularly update your twitter feed. But you can’t pay a thousand people to follow you. Well… you could… but you’d be missing the point!

Unlike traditional advertising, where the more you spend, the more “airtime” you get, the bigger your advert or the longer it runs, etc, the point of social media is that people do your marketing for you.

So how do you get noticed?

The only worthwhile investment targeted at social media is good creative.

If you want people to blog about, tweet about, or simply share your message, you’ve got to give them an incentive. Only a good creative can come up with an inspired idea for a video that goes viral. Only a good copywriter can come up with a message that people want to pass on. Only a good designer can come up with an image that sticks in people’s minds.

If you spend thousands promoting yourself via social media, think again. Sure, you need to spend some money promoting yourself, getting your face, your name — your brand — out there. But the less you spend actually marketing yourself, the better. Good creative will provide you with a message that your customers will pass on to each other. It’s the only worthwhile spend there is.

So by all means cut back on your social media budget. There is, after all, good evidence that social media isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But it’s not just a case of investing less. It’s a case of investing smart. Creative is the way to do that.

A strategy for success:

Produce less content. Spend less time actively marketing it.
Spend money creating content that actually gets people talking.

Good content will market itself.

Simplify your online presence. Invest in good creative.

I’ve blogged before about how the forthcoming election will represent a paradigm shift in the advertising industry. Elections influence the advertising world for years to come, in the same way that wars create demand for new weapons… election campaigns force us to regularly re-evaluate marketing strategy. It’s a compressed period of time, a testing ground where we can quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t. The forthcoming election will be almost entirely about digital media. Whoever comes up with the most rebloggable, retweetable, viral content will win the advertising war.

Political blogger Iain Dale seems to think so too. His comment about Labour’s new poster campaign being almost totally irrelevant says it all:

No political party worth its salt spends any money on poster campaigns any longer. They don’t need to because the marketing can be done virally, for free.

It’s those last four words that count.

Marketing can be done virally, for free.

When it comes to social media, the only worthwhile spend is on good creative.

It’s inevitable. Most people see social media as a way of connecting with their friends. Nobody sees it as a glorified mechanism for product placement except for advertisers and their clients. People are going to start blocking out marketing-related social media the same way they kill adverts with AdBlock Plus (which I use, by the way — it’s there, who wouldn’t?).

We’re killing the golden goose.

Brand Republic reported today that only 33% of customers trust social networking sites to provide the information they require to make an informed decision about a purchase.

I’ll qualify that with the following comments:

• It’s perfectly possible the study was commissioned with the aim of putting social media in a bad light. But cui bono – who benefits? Most agencies are stampeding over one another to reach the top of the social media pile. This study should give us all pause for thought.
  
• The statistic is 33% to “make an informed decision” about a purchase. It’s perfectly possible that 99% of social network users see social media as part of the process of making an informed decision. They’ll then google prices, reviews, etc –  while social media may not be the deciding factor, it still has an influence. You wouldn’t buy something just because someone’s twittered about it. But you might read a review about it, or go and check one out in the shops.
  
• When compared to the 68% who trust “other online sources”  such as price comparison websites, it’s clear that social media isn’t the ‘magic bullet’ some commentators were making out it was. In fact, it’s perfectly possible that social media just isn’t that important.

But why isn’t social media as important as a price comparison website? The answer lies with the question of trust. 33% trust social media. 68% trust other sources.

I think the flood of digital marketing agencies towards ‘harnessing’ social media is responsible for this lack of trust.

How do we we rebuild trust in social media?
The answer’s simple. We stop milking it for all it’s worth.

Consumers are getting smarter. They were never dumb. But the more information they have at their fingertips, the harder it is to pull the wool over their eyes. So don’t try.

Inform first. Persuade second.
Then, when that’s done, try to sell.

Nobody likes spam. They do like product comparison websites. Nobody likes being told what to think — or what to buy — they do like making informed choices. And if you talk to them like human beings, they’ll listen.

That’s the way to use social media.

Engage with your customers. Strengthen your brand by building up trust — talk to them. Social media is a conversation. It’s not a platform for you to shout your wares like a Sunday market trader.

So I got talking. I didn’t go to pitch my services, rather I went to brush up on the latest developments on the web. What are London’s finest web entrepreneurs talking about?

Well, unsurprisingly, the present obsession is social media. What did surprise me somewhat was how cynical many of the people I met were about it.

Web entrepreneurs think social media has limitations

One person — whose business is basically centred around Twitter — told me, in devastating words, “social media is just a buzzword… it’s the new SEO… all the people who were marketing themselves as SEO experts or gurus or whatever a couple of years ago, well, now they’re the social media experts. Of course they know nothing about either.”

Of course he’s right. SEO was an arcane art and promised more than it could deliver — usually because it attracted one real expert to every ten cowboys. It seems the majority of web entrepreneurs feel social media is going the same way.

People are five times more likely to trust social media than other ads — but for how long?

I’ve been doing a lot of work in social media lately. I think I know a lot about it — I’ve been blogging almost nine years, I was on Facebook when there were only a few ‘university networks’ and you had to have a uni address to join (remember that?) and I can cogently argue using examples, metrics and conversion rate statistics to explain to you exactly why I don’t bother using twitter.

The most interesting statistic I’ve dug up on social media is this: people are five times more likely to trust a recommendation from a friend than they are an advert on the web (stat derived from Socialnomics). That’s not surprising in itself. In fact, it seems like stating the obvious.

What I do wonder is how long that will carry on for. I see an enormous amount of social media “experts” all jumping aboard the bandwagon trying to use social media as a cheap, ROI rich way of advertising. There’s little evidence that social media boosts conversion rates although as I’ve said elsewhere, “you can’t put a price on a conversation, or value the ability to get inside your customers’ heads.”

But I’ve come to look upon social media as something of a goldmine. Incredibly valuable at first. But sooner or later, it’ll run out.

My fear is that the more and more we use social media to push products,
The more social media will become devalued as a platform.

People trust it at the minute because they’re not cynical towards it,
The way they’re cynical about ads on radio or TV.

What will happen if social media marketing campaigns are mismanaged? I know some very good ones — in fact, I’m working on one right now. But I do begin to fear the backlash as more and more companies rush to cash in on virgin markets.

People trust social media. The question is, will the increased use of social media to market goods and services result in a loss of trust — or will social media find a way around it?

Will it, essentially, learn how to reject the most overt advertising campaigns, and pour scorn on the people who use it wrongly, as it did when Habitat attempted to use Twitter?

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 using Twitter to make grass roots activists feel more included…

…but is there a risk that Labour positioning itself as the “social media party” will detract from the real issues the public care about? “We’ve been careful about this,” says McCarthy, “as there’s nothing worse than politicians trying to be trendy. Authenticity is important and people will see if we are using it as a gimmick…

But how significant will social media be in helping Labour to victory in 2010? “It’s not the magic bullet that will win the election; it’s a small part of getting across the message but will help in getting activists enthused.”

PR Blog has highlighted a good point: twitter only reaches your converts. It rarely converts new listeners — and advertisers need to be noting that as keenly as politicians. They’ve also made a glaring mistake, by equating twitter with social media. Yes, Twitter is a form of social media, but it isn’t all social media.

As I’ve already pointed out, viral video and other ‘blitzkrieg’ guerrilla advertisements will be what changes the next general election. Tweets will merely give them more exposure.

With devastating simplicity, Guido has passed his own judgment in the comments:

“Oh and she is wrong about the use of social media in a political context, preaching to the choir or interacting without purpose with your base is not politically significant, nor will it have an electoral effect.

Carry on Tweeting, it won’t change the polls.“

I’m not against microblogging.

I’m just not a fan of the twitter format,

or the attitude that goes with it.

I’ve found one that I like – Tumblr.

It’s a great idea: a microblogging service that bills itself as a scrapbook for thoughts, musings, quotes, pictures, links and video. In short, it’s twitter without the restrictive word-count and the emphasis on links. You follow people and have followers. I’m already a big fan. I’ve been following Don Draper for quite some time. My tumblr is full of random musings and aphorisms — it’s also considerably less professional than my blog here. It’s good to let your hair down.

Can anyone recommend me any other good tumblr’s to follow? I’m hooked.

Speaking of mistakes…

…a neckbeard got in touch to point out, not nicely, either, that there was — shock horror — a spelling mistake somewhere on this website and I’d never make it as a writer if I couldn’t spell. I pointed out, rather brusquely, that I’m not a proofreader, and I am, in fact, shockingly, human. That’s to say, I do make mistakes. People hire me because I come up with brilliant branding ideas backed up with sound, cogent copy. They don’t hire me because I’m a grammar nazi. I apologise for my mistake.

He’s the first person out of 16,831 visitors to this site since July to notice. Or perhaps, simply the first person to care. I won’t be offering a prize. I’m sure fastidiousness of this nature is its own reward.

If my eagle eyed friend thinks my dropping an “e” from a word was the most enormous mistake I’ve ever made, I’d hate to see what he’d make of my last relationship…

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 transparent attempt at generating traffic, without regard to the type of user you’re attracting, or the conversion rate you’ll get.

It’s great when people tweet about you, because that’s a personal recommendation. But I also trust a recommendation from a friend on the basis of a blog post, facebook message, SMS or word-of-mouth.

Social media is in danger of becoming just another buzzword. The new SEO. It’s too valuable a tool to let that happen.

It’s become a digital arms race — everybody’s looking for the nuclear social media technique. Twitter, while it has its uses, is more of a cluster bomb — indiscriminate, and used improperly, bloody annoying. Constant twittering will eventually become the social media equivalent of constantly resubmitting your site to Delicious, et al. Devalued to the point of worthlessness.

I read 30 blogs via RSS every day — from the BBC and Times feed to Guido and Perez Hilton, to pirate operations from the bedrooms of as-yet-undiscovered friends. Why? Because they keep me informed. They are my filter to the events of the day. I trust these thirty or so to tell me all I need to know. I turn to their Facebooks, their Livejournals and yes, even a select few twitters, to keep me in the loop. I’m selective, and I generally want a bit of explanation along with my link. Twitter just doesn’t provide enough information for me.

I’m an information hound.

Most people are content with a lot less. Most people are content with fast food, too — but you’ll never attract your best clients that way. I reckon quality content, with a bit (not too much) detail is the best way to increase serious traffic and boost conversion rates. So if Twitter is a Big Mac & Fries, the smorgasbord of social media I’d suggest is more like a palate-perfect plate of nouvelle cuisine.

The key for advertisers, and the companies they represent, is figuring out how to reach people.

A lot of other digital media is getting overlooked in the big rush to Twitter. Don’t forget that people spend three times as long on Facebook as they do on Google. And whether or not they’re reading blogs, someone is — that’s why big, “household name” blogs set the agenda for what everyone’s talking about, and that’s what influences people’s daily tweets.

In short, it’s important that your social media strategy
reaches everyone, either directly or indirectly.

The best way to do that is by influencing the wider discussion,
across all social media, with intelligent comment,
not just mindless links.

And it has to be simple.

Case in point:

I was frankly baffled by this newest offering from Pizza Express. To briefly explain, you have to install (yet another) app in Facebook, invite whoever you want, use the app to make a reservation at your chosen pizza express, and then you get lunch for a tenner. Oh yeah, and Facebook proudly tells the world you’ve installed the app and invited your mate out for a cheap lunch. Privacy concerns? Not half.

I had lunch last week. There was a Pizza Express and a Prezzo on the same street. If I’d planned in advance, and used a system that’s a lot more complex than a printed, money-off voucher, I could’ve got the Pizza Express deal. The Prezzo had a sign outside saying “Buy one get one free on all main courses”. I picked the Prezzo.

Social media only works when it takes the shortest path. When it simplifies. When it makes life easier.

That’s why this is a brilliant example of social media being used to good effect: you can now befriend a gorilla on Facebook for a dollar, a bit like sponsoring a pet. Only it’s simple, immediate, fun, doesn’t require an app, instantly tells your friends that you support wildlife conservation. It’s an instant hit.

I blogged the General Election, back in 2005. Blogging was different then. We were mostly ignored. My blog was just an irreverant look at the campaigns, you wouldn’t have come to it for news.

Yes, we all know blogs are going to be important this time around. We’ve got Guido, Iain Dale, Conservative Home, and even a few offerings from Labour — which are nowhere near as widely read, which I thinks says a lot.

But in the hoo-hah about blogging, it’s easy to forget that the internet is much more than just the political blogosphere.

It’s not just blogs that have gone mainstream in the last five years. It’s viral video.

Dan Hannan’s searing attack on Gordon Brown went viral. Two and a half million views of his “devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government” speech. The blogs have given us smeargate, the ousting of Damien McBride and Derek Draper by Guido Fawkes. That’s a much more powerful story. But when it comes to general elections, campaigns get quick and dirty. Viral video will be the blitzkrieg tactic of choice for both sides.

Not all the videos will be sanctioned.
Many will be sanctioned. Secretly.

All the main players know the power of a good attack video — both political parties, and their supporters. Five years ago, to reach voters visually, you were limited to a 5 minute party political broadcast, a few a month, at set times, with strict limits on what you could say.

What’s interesting is that, today, the electoral commission has come out and said that in this battleground, there will be no rules. None. At all. They cannot police viral video.

Expect things to get down and dirty, very quick.

A couple of examples —
Guido uses his blog to simply demonstrate Gordon Brown caught in a lie. He doesn’t even need to pass comment.
The unofficial ConservativeHome produces a blunt attack video to highlight Gordon Brown’s broken promises.

I for one would love to know which agencies are handling the digital accounts of the main parties, and their supporters. Viral videos are cheap to make, incredibly powerful, and totally without boundaries. The next election campaign will be like none we’ve ever seen before. Whoever makes the most memorable attack video will probably make the same name for themselves that Saatchi & Saatchi made in 1979 with the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working‘ — probably the most memorable British political campaign of all time.

This is an exciting time for advertisers willing to get their hands dirty in politics. Reputations will be won and lost. The direction of British politics decided for maybe a decade, or more.

The Internet: still the World’s Wild West.

I’m a busy man. Just give me the information.

Facebook lite promises to roll back the clock four years and give us the slim, streamlined social networking tool that made MySpace look ugly, primitive and unintuitive. I’ve had a ‘lite’ profile for a while now. No pictures. No surplus user information for third party apps to harvest. No quotes of the day, no videos, just my contact details, alongside the ability to message me and see what I’m up to.

My facebook is just my LinkedIn at play. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

It isn’t perfect yet. It’s still in beta. The text is too big, and I’d like it to be more customizable — there’s some information on the big facebook I might still want to access.

But what interests me is seeing just how many people will switch to Facebook lite once it’s done. I think takeup may well be over 50% — if they can get the interface and integration right. There’s a lot of us who carry on using services like Facebook on sufferance, because it’s there, because it’s the only way of keeping in touch with our friends. We’re the sort of people who grit our teeth and look away in despair, as if a silent fart has drifted across the room, every time you mention Mafia Wars.

We’re the silent majority.

The implications for social media, even if takeup only hits, say, 20%, are obvious — and huge. It means a massive number of users are rejecting the bloatware that’s been foisted on them the past few years. It also means that any links they do share, anything that does go on their profile, will be much more valuable, from a social networking perspective.

Make no mistakes. Facebook Lite isn’t a pioneering project to reduce bandwidth in third world countries, whatever they may say. It’s a system that proves what many of us have been saying all along — when it comes to social media, less is more. Sure, some people twitter every hour. They’re probably the same people who post a dozen quizzes to their Facebook wall every day. But the person who posts just one thing a day, maybe even just one link a week, or even a month — they’re being selective. That makes the value of that post is far greater.

Of course, the new Facebook Lite interface is a lot more like twitter — it does after all focus on status updates. But it remains to be seen if people will use it like twitter. After all, isn’t there already a service called twitter for people who want it?

Anyone who uses social media as a marketing tool should be taking notes.

I’m actually in awe of Facebook for doing this. They’ve differentiated their product for users like me, who are busy and just need the basic facts, from the people who use it for “fun”. My only question is, why didn’t they do it sooner?

Are they worried about the competition? With Twitter on one side and LinkedIn on the other, the answer is almost certainly yes. Facebook lite appeals to users of both.

It’s a stroke of genius.

Yet times are changing. Already it’s being argued that Facebook is killing SEO. Essentially, ‘linkbait’ is what’s going to drive hits to your website in the future. It’s another one of those fancy buzzwords, but it’s nothing new. It’s just a modern form of a technique that has worked for generations — in fact, forever. It’s a personal recommendation.

Yes, there are a myriad of tricks a writer can use to draw more visitors to your site. But at the end of the day, it’s the quality of the content that keeps people coming back, quality that people will tell their friends about. Online and offline, it’s all about the brand image.

If you’re trying to sell people something, they’re still going to be looking at two things: the quality of the product offered, and the right price. Keep them happy and they will tell their friends they’re happy. It’s hardly brain science, or rocket surgery. With the ludicrously high turnover of buzzwords on the web, it’s easy to start believing the hype.

SEO, like twitter, was very much a buzzword of last year. We mustn’t diminish its importance, but it’s also vital to remember the fundamentals. Writing for the web is very much like writing anywhere else. It’s a one-on-one conversation between you and your client, and you need to build up a rapport. The fundamentals of writing for the web should still be good copy. SEO is the icing on the cake.

It’s easy to get bowled over by buzzwords. SEO is vital now but with ‘linkbait’ strategies becoming more important, the basics of good writing remain. Incidentally, my father called me last week. He runs a very successful business, had a laptop when they were big as briefcases, and bought his first mobile phone in the eighties. These days he’s never more than thirty seconds away by BlackBerry. He said to me, ‘I’ve seen your latest blog post. What the hell is twitter?’

I was proud of him. It’s precisely the attitude a company director should take. If you need any further proof that fools rush in, take a look at how Habitat made fools out of themselves twittering this week. Or Jordan.

‘Nuff said.

And they said — write about Twitter.

I said no. For starters, I don’t twitter. From what I’ve seen of it, I’ve no desire to be any part of it. Moreover, writers writing about twitter (from either side) have pretty much done the subject to death. Talking about Twitter (if you’ll forgive me sounding like a teenager) is just so 2008.

Then I read this. If you can’t be bothered to read it, I’ll save you a bit of time. It’s pretentious crap. If you don’t believe me, I’ll reprint the title for you. “Twitter ripped the veil off ‘the other’ – and we saw ourselves” it screams, all but adding a double!! exclamation mark in a hyperbolic gesture that boomerangs back right up its backside. The article goes on to loudly proclaim that twitter “allowed the world to connect with the Tehran rebels.”

Yes, we get it. With Twitter you can aggregate a vast number of voices in a very short space of time. And, obviously, a lot of them are pretty angry about the recent elections over there. But really, this is just stating the pretty-bleeding-obvious. Moreover, it doesn’t tell us a great deal else. Using twitter in this way is really just a way of counting crowds. It’s no more revolutionary than taking a straw poll of your mates down the pub — only now you can do it for people a thousand miles away. It’s something, I admit. But it’s hardly the reinvention of the web.

The simple fact is there are better sources available elsewhere — and the web has made those pretty much instantaneous, too. And if you want the real scoop on Iran, you’re better off looking at the detailed analysis. Already I can access this excellent report from Chatham House.

If you want a report with a personal twist, you’re still better off sticking to the blogs. Remember Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger? His reports were instrumental in giving us the inside story on the Iraq invasion. I don’t think his commentary would have been nearly as insightful had he been limited to a few hundred characters a few times a day.

And therein lies the problem. Twitter is a mess. It’s a morass of voices, most of them mumbling pretty inane stuff about their daily lives. I’ve seen people twitter about who they’re sitting next to on the bus — invariably a smelly old man they’d rather not be sitting next to. A fun way of keeping in touch with mates, perhaps. But a revolution in communications it ain’t.

Twitter isn’t good for business because it isn’t businesslike. It is a medium that demands immediacy, and that’s best done at a personal level. Sure you could have your CEO twitter, but shouldn’t he be busy running the business? And if you employ a firm to twitter for you, or leave it to your in-house PR people, well, you’re still missing the point of what Twitter is best at.

I don’t twitter because I think 99% of the time it’s vapid and inane. I wouldn’t encourage anyone in business to twitter for the same reason. Okay, so you can reach your clients quickly. But is sending them a 140 character message that shows up next to some other message about their mate who’s stuck next to Mr Stinky on the bus again really going to send out the message you want to project?