Of all the nonsense about social media, I can’t say I have heard it represented as a money saver until I read this interview with Jane Postlethwaite (Social Media Can Save Council Money). Man it’s weird to call a YouTuber buy her full name when you basically barely know her first name. She’s StylistBrighton, damnit (and SytlistBrightonStyle). Imet the fashion stylist/model in London, but who knew her name was Postlethewaite?
Anyway the former fashion model and YouTube weblebrity is now the Brighton and Hove City Council Social Media Officer, and she’s opening the UK government’s eyes to using social media to reduce costs. It’s a fair point. When you have 9,000 employees and take 400 calls a day, there’s got to be an efficiency angle… keeping or improving relationships with the public without the burden and cost of mail and phones.
Could social media one day permit these people to see sunlight?
I have a client that receives 500 calls daily in a customer-service department with only about 4 or 5 people. If customers could gain access to basic information (the 80% of the calls that represent the same 10 questions), why shouldn’t social media provide cost offset? As an example, I no longer call stores to check their hours or directions… Google covers that for me, and its’ faster and has zero cost to me or the company.
So kudos to Jane for being brave enough to enlighten a government office to social media (far braver than me trying to do it for pharmaceutical firms). And extra credit for conceiving it as an efficient channel of communication that can maintain or improve public relations and also reduce calls, letters, lines of people…
One day, when the US catches up, I hope I can update my driver’s license in a single tweet. A girl can have her dreams.
I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with social-media monitoring tools, and their inability to filter out old content or spam bots using my old content. It’s very easy for me to assess a social-media tool by querying my own name (Nalts). I know instantly what content about me is new, and can recognize old content that has been repurposed by spam sites, which often grab my old blogs and video descriptions to fool search engines and people into thinking they’re not autobots.
Here’s an example from my Google Alerts, which I am about to discontinue. None of this is new! Even Google can’t determine what’s old anymore... and some of this links to my own blog posts that are ancient. This makes me question the prevailing myth that Google will overtake the social-media monitoring landscape with its own free solution.
Is there a solution? Even the best social-media tools can’t seem to discern between legitimate recent posts (of me anyway) that are on my sites or others.
I’ve been writing a bit about currated content, and now I remember when this caught my attention. Daisy Whitney reports on Hitwise’s Bill Tancer (author of Click) and how he answers the question:
What are the people who were early adopters of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube doing NOW?
Hitwise tracks tens of millions of people via ISP data, and could identify a collection of those who were early to social media. By watching their recent ISP data, we can fairly accurately predict the next big thing. I’ve searched but can’t find the information about this that Tancer provided at the iMedia Connections event in Vegas.
This Content-to-Commerce post revealed some interesting social-media statistics, and prompted me to answer two questions:
“Why aren’t digital agencies bringing social-media to clients?”
“Why can’t brands seem to overcome their internal inertia?”
I have the somewhat rare experience of having seen social media strategy and tactics in various roles: as a marketer (client), client stakeholder (legal, PR, web), agency and even as a vendor to agencies.
The agencies will tell you that their marketing and PR clients WANT it, but the marketing client’s attorneys and bureaucracy is preventing it. The marketer may blame delays or failures on the digital or PR agency or more likely internal stakeholders. The reality is that all three (brand team, client stakeholders and partners) need to be aligned, or face months of nonsense for a tactic that may not yet be proven.
Here are some additional excuses and some ways to snuff them:
1) Agencies aren’t profiting on social-media like they do on web development and media buying. This, I believe, is the real reason agencies have been tentative about social media. Solution: give your agency an incentive by allowing them to conduct projects that aren’t specific to web development. Allow fees (project or retainer) to cover social-media strategists and monitoring. Sure it’s free to create many accounts (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) but doing it well requires expertise.
2) My PR agency, AOR and web firm are telling me different things. Solution: Find one agency to lead social media, because it’s not easy to share it. Typically this would be your digital agency, although some are not driving social media as a progressive PR firm. I would not expect much out of an offline agency of record.
3) My internal stakeholders are “questioning it to death.” Solution: This is common, and your agency should help you develop the business case based on what you’re hearing as inevitable internal obstacles (which aren’t usually new, and were used to stop marketers from embracing the web). Attorneys are legitimately worried about legal ramifications, but a well-managed social-media strategy will address those risks and minimize them. Most problems attorneys fear are extremely rare. Public relations leaders are terrified about a negative Wall Street Journal resulting from a social-media error. Again, rare, but there are certainly enough examples to substantiate their fear.
There are two ways to address irrational stakeholder fears: first, make the business case to offset the risk. Second, put the risk in perspective. If you don’t do both, your chances of realizing the benefit of social-media are reduced by 80%.
4) My agency is clueless about Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Solution: Demand expertise, and drop the agency if they can’t respond. Often the client is underwhelmed because his/her account team is not well informed. Sometimes there’s a social-media expert that’s cross accounts. Give your account team a reason to engage that person and learn from him/her.
5) The final excuse may require some self examination. It’s quite possible the marketer is the obstacle. If you haven’t been convinced social-media can drive sales, you’re probably sending your agencies mixed messages. Solution: Tell your agency you believe social-media may be important, but need to be convinced. Give them an opportunity to challenge some of your preconceived notions, like:
My target customer doesn’t use social media.
I don’t want my brand on the wild-west of YouTube (we said that about the web a decade ago).
It’s going to be too difficult to implement — too many internal barriers. The “return on hassle” isn’t there.
The ROI isn’t evident.
Even if I did something, I’m not sure it would scale enough to impact sales.
These are legitimate concerns, but be open to facts that may convince you otherwise. Keep in mind that some of the highest performing levers of the marketing mix (paid search and websites) faced similar scrutiny when they were new.
Just discovered Vidque.com via Steve Garfield, and it’s another example of a site built to solve the fundamental problem for those of us that don’t live in online-video.
What the hell do we watch?
Since I just spent more than a couple hours navigating Vidque, creating a profile and critiquing it… you’d better f’ing read this. Vidque allows you to bookmark, share and find good videos, and operates fairly seamlessly with Twitter and YouTube. At first it looks like a curator site (or another video-sharing site) because the homepage boasts some good videos. But you need to look deeper to find the cooler functions or see the potential it might have.
I’ve set up my own Vidque.com Nalts page (featuring, of course, only my own videos). I’ve got one follower and his name is Lukas. I’m following him now. We’re instant BFFs.
Here’s my critique… first, what I like:
I like the idea of a tool that easily integrates with Twitter and YouTube, and allows communities to help each other sift through videos. YouTube is working toward solving that, but it doesn’t appear to be Google’s priority.
Vidque got a smooth API with YouTube and it functions fairly well. Although this was not immediately apparent, there’s an easy bookmark tool so you can favorite videos (moving them into your Vidque favorites) right from YouTube. Click here for a video about how that’s done.
Very Web 2.0 design. Not too crowded looking.
The homepage had some great videos selected, and current/fresh ones. Someone’s picking them, or there is some intelligence behind it.
I am inclined to send people to my page because it was easy to customize, looks clean and allows me to sort out my best videos. I would expect the site gives us additional options for sorting (beyond stupid “category,” which is almost unnecessary). The networks will take care of that… I have business friends and humor friends and I’m damned sure not going to follow the eyeballs of by business friends. I’ll know if it comes from Jan it’s going to be awesome, funny or sometimes representing some weird political agenda that’s way over my head. Zack may “favorite” a few shitty Weezer videos, but hopefully he leads me to the last unboring Coffin video. I’m not touching the entertainment section because an entire screen full of Buckley‘s recent videos will frighten me. Mabye Marquis will tip me off to something totally wacked (as we await Beth’s return). If only he knew that my sister, Mathilde, and I speak of him more often than our siblings.
What I don’t like, and hope Vidque will evolve:
Biggest mistake is the homepage design. Because it focuses on a collection of videos and a category-style primary navigation it first feels like another video-sharing site. The site should put the people (now buried as “recently active users” in the bottom-left corner) at the center. Encourage people to curate, and reward them in non-monetary ways for finding stuff people like. Designate “editors” and “super editors” (by category if you must) and allow us to subscribe once we realize their favorites are consistently good.
It took me too long to understand it’s not just another video-sharing site or simply curated video, but crowd-sourced, community sharing. The cute but slow overview video helped.
I’d like the ability to search people, and find out what they’ve identified as good video. But beyond the “recently active users” I couldn’t search or sort curators unless we had done that via e-mail or the antiquated “invite your friends” option we all skip anymore. Basically I want to “follow” some people, but don’t know where to start. Twitter made that easy because as soon as I found one friend, I could quickly find a flock. Nutcheese invited me to Twitter, and I just followed all of her peeps. Then I found CharlesTrippy and followed his followers or followees.
I hope Vidque will give us what Twitter and YouTube don’t provide: allow me to “follow” people in different ways: some as “I like you and I’ll check your page now and then” and others as “I know what videos you identify will consistently amuse or interest me… I want them pushed to me via Twitter, Vidque, or even e-mail.”
I was disappointed to find very old videos on the humor section (puleez- that Dave Blaine parody again? Really?) because the homepage made me think I was getting fresh content. I would strongly suggest having an intuitive navigation separating fresh or newly popular content from old classics.
Until the site automates it, the homepage and “categories” should rotate more… right now it doesn’t feel dynamic.
Bit buggy (logging in, and some error messages when feeding it YouTube URLs manually. Feels like a beta.
I like how it grabs YouTube content and embeds it via API. It even grabs the thumbnail I chose, which isn’t even true with AppleTV (which is still using defaults). But it’s still too “stand alone” because I can’t import my YouTube favorites or a playlist… so only as worthwhile as we make it from now on. Populating favorites is very cumbersome and counter intuitive until you realize you can do this via a bookmark tool. For instance, when I’m done with one, there’s no “post another.”
I wouldn’t have spent the time reviewing this site (with an unfortunately forgettable name) if I didn’t think this is opening up a new door to video content identification and sharing. I’ve oversubscribed on YouTube and we know the “most popular” and “most watched” aren’t necessarily serving us.
If a few of my friends (or people whose taste I share in video) start using it, we’ll be able to swap videos without the intrusion of “StumbleUpon” or cluttering our Facebook, Twitter or other social-media tools overwhelming us all. I’ll give it a shot, and start saving some videos that aren’t mine. But Vidque better allow me to give my own videos top billing. 🙂
Would you trust your social-media voice to an improv comic?
I recently told a few hundred Canadian marketers that their social-media expert should be an improv comic, an insight that hit me during my all-night roadtrip to Toronto. Moments later, one former improv comic (from Freshed Baked Entertainment) confided at lunch that he’s using his improv experience to help brands create entertaining content.
This notion mostly went over well, and I pledged to write about it. I’m beginning here on WillVideoForFood.com and I’ve posted it on Scribd (a good way to distribute and SEO-optimize your writing if you can’t afford PRWeb or PRNewswire). If you’re a blogger or publisher, I invite you to use part or all of this with attribution… and hope to fancy it up for a magazine.
I have four sources of inspiration for this concept:
ImprovEverywhere’s Charlie Todd, who I’m connected to in an odd way that falls between friend and fan. It’s a parasocial relationship, but since I’ve met him and he returns my phone calls or e-mails I’m allowing myself to call dub the “Causing a Scene” author a “virtual colleague.” I was struck with how well he does media, and I attribute that to his experience as both an improv comic and advanced teacher of the discipline. Todd, in fact, was who encouraged me to enroll in the wildly heraldedUCB Theater in NYC. I’d later, sadly, become an improv-school dropout because I lost my financial excuse to visit NYC weekly and my dad died. But I’ll do it again.
I did significant research to prepare for my Improv Comedy course, and learned a tremendous amount in the early classes. My goal was not to become an improv comic, but understand how improvisational skills might translate to my work and life. Like you, perhaps, I often default to “fighting the wind” (arguing the inevitable), which can be empowering but both exhausting and unsustainable. So I hoped to learn new ways to “roll with life” or “go with the flow.” One of my favorite affirmations is “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference” (source). How many of life’s “problems” would vanish if we gave ourselves that rare gift?
Finally, David Alger is one of many improv-comics that crystalized the basic “rules” of improv comedy, and I hope to help you see how some of these rules apply to your social-media presence. I quote him simply because he ranked high on Google SEOs for “improv comedy rules,” but there’s no shortage of wisdom on improvisational comedy. I’m quite sure there are dozens of other applicable rules I’ve left out (like being honest, a truism in both improv and social-media).
So forgive me for being an improv-comic dropout, but trust that what I learned in my first portion of the class will help you either find a good social-media expert or nurture one who is. I give you “The Seven Reasons Your Social-Media Expert Should Be an Improvisational Comic.”
It’s now easy to search YouTube comments without diving into each video and clicking “show all comments.” In a vital move, Google now invites you to search ALL COMMENTS here. Nice job, Google & YouTube. I’ve been begging for this, and with this and the Twitter partnership… you’ve become a real-time engine again.
I can only imagine you’re now developing something that will make social-media monitoring tools obsolete.
YouTube comments are another channel to mine for your brand (or ego surf). We can only hope that Google will provide some advanced filtering. For instance, eliminating spam or allowing us to search by “influence” as defined by the video or commenter.
Although YouTube doesn’t make it easy to spam comments, it’s now quite easy to add noise to this channel. For instance, I can type “Starburst” over and over again in various comments, and Starbucks might think it’s suddenly getting buzz. Or I could ask all of my viewers to type “Citibank sucks” in the comments, and that might set off alarms in the secret Citibank monitoring cabin.
In my opinion, today Twitter became CNN (in the same way CNN’s coverage of Jessica McClure put it on the map). In fairness, I became a bit obsessed with the “kid in weather balloon” story when I saw it live via CNN on a lobby television at the hotel where I was speaking… ironically speaking on the topic of real-time search, wisdom of crowds, and changes with search. Alas, the definitive case study for these three topics would surface just an hour after I spoke. I started tweeting with hash-tag #saveballoonboy, and it became one of the “hottest” Twitter trends.
Falcon Heene was thought to be flying inside his dad’s UFO-like weather balloon. CNN showed live helicopter footage of the balloon swirling 25-50 mph, which made this a remarkable news story — especially to those who learned about it before Falcon was recovered.
But CNN was slow with the seemingly obvious fact… As I should have known (from my helium experiments setting a FlipCam to the sky) the weather balloon could not have easily carried a 6-year-old child away… although the parents and authorities must have thought it a possibility. And when the child was MIA, rumors started that he’d fallen off to his death… that witnesses had seen something drop. His brother saw him sail away (in fact he had simply heard Falcon planning to climb into the basket/compartment.
CNN got Jessica McLure right, but left most of us frustrated and demanding more today. Others made it a top-trending keyword today, as we shared what news we had… like a post apocalypse scenario with CD-Radios.
This evening at 5:00 EST, I called my sister (who is a prodcuer at a major network) and asked her what she had… little more than already had been reported (although she had a lot of background already on the family). I begged her to call a neighbor of Heene, and see if she could circumvent the poor communication between rescuers (who clearly knew the balloon was empty) and the news media.
Want to know who broke the story for me? A stranger named Kelley Vinson (KelleySaidThis) using an iPhone police radio app (assuming she wasn’t kidding she wins $50 for the scoop… I promised). Moments later, I called my sister (who works at a major network) and she finally told me her network had announces the child was safe. A YouTube friend sent me a message via Twitter that confirmed CNN was confirming he was safe.
Frankly, the few hours felt exponentially longer than the 58 hours Jessica was in a well. And the coverage was slow, speculative and not fast enough for a just-in-time search-fueled audience.
Today’s lesson? Google, radio, television and other media are not serving us in a crisis or breaking news story. It’s just not fast enough. Clearly we want a credible medium, and I was hungry for sources (since there was plenty of hoax and rumors, or endless reverberations of the previous news).
Folks the field is wide open here. Citizen journalists now have Twitter, and we need ways to credential sources (maybe an earned badge based on previous reliability like eBay). We need real-time news. We need to find a way to help advance the story, like a way that local witnesses can provide input.
Like during the Michael Jackson trial, TMZ scooped the story, but Twitter propogated it.
As I type (and after I shot this video), CNN has excellent coverage… with an interview with the family that’s playing in the background. Wolf Blitzer gets “thumbs down” for asking children yes/no questions, but surprisingly was the first to tell Falcoln’s father that the balloon was recovered with the door shut… nobody had given him that amazingly encouraging piece of information. Still- when we were begging for new facts, the anchors were left with little more than the obvious… and Twitter had more.
Here’s an 8-minute reflective with my kids (5 and 7). About 7 minutes too long. Fly, Falcon, Fly.
If you’re planning a conference about social media, and you haven’t got me on the docket then you’re screwed. Because I’m friggin’ hot right now. I was tired of the endless parade of social-media articles… they were repetitive, annoying, and written by people that had no business as authorities on social media.
Dear conference planner, I propose the following. I’ll get up at your next conference, and you list me as a “social media expert.” Then I’ll take on any of the personalities from this video… and just fall apart gradually. Begin with confidence, but then begin to fall apart. Thus spoofing the whole absurdity of “social media” hype.
