The presentation was a great insight into an area that many people do, but few people do well and it continues the run of top presenters who always amaze me with their willingness to divulge inside knowledge.  You can see Ross’ presentation slides below.

With any luck the next event at the Seabird Centre in North Berwick will be just as successful and I hope to see you all there http://bit.ly/caktVt

The video is still available on YouTube and Les Brecknell can now be found at Dale Media.

The way I saw it was that businesses should be eager to engage and that not following back was tantamount to snubbing the tweeter who had taken the time to show an interest in your brand.  I’ve just taken a little time to search through the Web to see what people are saying on the topic and the only arguments against that I can figure out are that it can lead to too much noise and that you could end up following spam or bots.  With regards to the first point about excess ‘noise’, surely that’s where aggregators such as HootSuite come into play, letting you set up alerts for key words or phrases and lists where you can monitor a select number of your followers in one place.  As for the second point, I can’t believe it takes more than a couple of seconds to determine from their profile pic and recent tweets whether a twitter follower is spam or not.

I can only see positives from following a tweeter who has taken the time to express an interest in your brand.  It shows them you’re aware of their presence, that you care what they say (whether you do or not and whether you actually tune into what they are saying or not) and it presents an additional opportunity for getting your brand displayed – the email to say you’re following them and the display of your brand in their followers list.

I’m perhaps cutting off my nose to spite my face now and will no doubt miss out on some amazing offer from a business that I stopped following because they never followed me back – and I don’t imagine for one minute that they are mourning my absence – but I feel like if any business can go to the effort of creating a Twitter account but can’t take a few seconds a day to re-follow its followers then I’m not  that bothered about hearing what they’re saying.  I’d love to hear if there was another reason for businesses not automatically following its followers that I’ve missed but in the meantime if I was a business, I would re-follow my followers…probably.

For those of you unfamiliar with bit.ly (or other similar’s such as tinyURL, SnipURL etc etc) it lets you shorten web links that you want to share with others.  It has probably achieved a higher popularity in recent months due to applications such as Twitter that limit the number of characters you can write (140).  After all when you only have 140 characters you don’t want to waste 80 of them on a web link.

But short links are much more than just convenience.  What is also lets you do is track the number of clicks each short link gets.  If you’re trying to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing messages then getting up to the minute statistics on the number of people clicking through to your link an be invaluable.

You can view an example of the stats it can provide at my bit.ly profile

Facebook: 68 friends
LinkedIn: 90 conections, 18 groups, 1 recommendation
Flickr: 14 images, 14 views
Twitter: 137 followers, following 130, 226 tweets
Delicious: 26 bookmarks
foursquare: 7 nights out, 8 check-ins
YouTube: 241 channel views

What does that tell me? Not a lot, but it will be interesting to review them in a few months and compare any growth or decline.  Social media is changing so quickly now that the stats could be drastically changed or could even include completely new mediums that haven’t even launched yet.

Interestingly enough the stats really don’t reveal anything interesting about the real benefit of social media, the two-way interaction that it allows you to make.  I may have posted 226 tweets but the what the stats don’t tell me is what these posts led to in terms of conversations and how many of these tweets were in response to my followers tweets.  I’m guessing there is something out there to analyse this so I’m off to find it.

For anyone reading who isn’t aware of what RSS Feeds do there is a handy guide to RSS Feeds on the BBC website but it is basically a program that allows you to store lists of your favourite websites.  It will then let you know when these sites have been updated and lets you read any new articles that have been posted.  It saves you from navigating to each of your favourite websites whenever you want to find new content.  If you’re a regular web traveller then it really is invaluable – I can’t believe I’ve waited so long to try it out.

My current feeds include the two BBC tech bloggers dot.rory and dot.maggie, the Guardian Technology pages, top social media news website Mashable and Charlie Brooker’s Screenburn column in the Guardian.  If you’ve got any suggestions for more feeds I’d like to hear them.

Anyway, we had a few less people than last time – perhaps due to the location? – but I think it was a success none the less.  Below is a copy of the powerpoint presentation we used to stimulate the discussion.

It seemed to have been in the background for a while but I’ve seen it cropping up more and more in recent weeks.  If you use Twitter you may have seen people geo-tagging their tweet so you can see where they were when they are tweeting.  In particular I’ve seen a service called foursquare getting mentioned a lot which is where we start to see possible applications for business.

Foursquare is being described as a location based social network.  You basically ‘check-in’ wherever you go and are rewarded with points for going further and to different places.  But it’s more than this, you can leave further comments too; just been to a new pub you like? Geo-tag it and leave a mini review.  Tag your business and a little about what you can offer.  You can then see how often foursquare users visit your business and reward them for doing so or get them to leave a geo-tag review.  It’s still in the very early stages – think twitter a couple of years ago – but expect more and more ways of using foursquare and in particular geo-tagging in the future.  In the meantime, it’s worth thinking how geo-tagging could be adapted to help your business.