Simply Zesty» – SimplyZesty

Why all the fuss about barcodes?

Lauren Fisher — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:43:32 +0000

So it seems the social media term du jour is barcode. Sticky Bits were all the rage at SXSW and earlier this week we all got a little bit excited here in the office when we saw an option pop up on one of our client’s Facebook pages to create a QR code. Sadly it’s gone now but the clever folk at Techcrunch nabbed a screenshot. So whether you’re calling them QR codes or barcodes, they’re pretty exciting…

Stickybits

Personally I am in love with StickyBits. They debuted at SXSW last week and the idea is that they integrate the real-world with online (who knew there was a difference??). They work by downloading barcodes either straight from the site, or on stickers, mugs and tshirts that you can buy. It is an exciting way to ‘tag your world’ and works with their iphone app, where you can easily scan barcodes. You’re then greeted with whichever content the creator uploaded.

To create your own stickybits content, take a picture with the app and attach your content, be it text, photo or video.

Stickybits are still in the startup phase and you can see how they made such a big splash at SXSW. It’s that kind of quirky content that we love, introducing some interactivity into something as seemingly mundane as a barcode. The potential for this is great and the only limits are your imagination.

Stickybits is one in a fairly long line of barcode apps but the potential for this to create a stir is clear. The fact that the creator can delete the content also makes it pretty exciting. In an interview with the co-founder, Billy Chasen also stated that the have intentions to work with brands, so it’ll be interesting to see which brands jump on board.

To see how stickybits work for yourself, check out my stickybit here

Now the concept of users scanning barcodes isn’t completely new. QR codes were invented in 1994 and worked by redirecting people to a url, that was determined by the creator. They were also developed for mobile phones, with apps that could scan the codes. Stickybits are different in that you are instantly presented with the content that was tagged. What many people are calling a ‘digital post-it’. Or graffitti for nerds. The difference with Stickybits is also the location tracking, so if you want to add a code to an object that’s carried around, you can track its progress. Stickybits also provide a much easier user experience than QR codes. I.e. I could create one.

What have Facebook got in store?

As for Facebook’s plans for QR codes, it’s not clear yet quite how they’re going to work or what their specific plans are, so for now we will have to watch this space. What will be interesting to see is if the giant that is Facebook completely overrides the marketing buzz that Stickybits are currently generating. I find the whole concept of scanning barcodes on your phone very exciting. Any developments that are made in mixing the offline and online catch my attention and I hope that this becomes more mainstream and the potential of something like Stickybits reaches widespread adoption.

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How To Massively Grow Your Email List

Niall Harbison — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:20:53 +0000

Above is the graph that shows the people subscribing to our email list. You can see that it was growing steadily during November, December and January. Steady but nothing spectacular. What you see then is a massive spike in subscribers at the start of February. What could have caused such a spike and over 600% growth in the list? Simple we gave something away for free…our social media E Book which you can see on the right hand side of the page. We do of course focus on social media but a strong mailing list can be the life blood of any successful online business and everybody from Apple to Manchester United use them to increase their sales.

Getting A Targeted List

I can go out this afternoon and buy a list of 10,000 emails, heck I could get a million if I really wanted to but getting targeted emails is the hard part. You may think that the old “pop your business card in here to win a bottle of champagne” trick that restaurants and hotels use is dated but let me tell you that works brilliantly as although crude and not sophisticated they are capturing the most targeted and relevant emails possible. By the same token you would hope that people signing up to download our Social Media Ebook will be interested in future Ebooks or other information that we want to communicate via email. I’d rather have a list of 50 highly targeted customers than 10,000 random people who will delete my email instantly.

Give something away for free

People don’t part with their email easily. It is a type of currency on the web and as such it is important that you offer something of value. We packaged some of our best posts and tips and made an easy to download Ebook and you should think of something similar for your business. There has to be something that you can give away for free that will add value to the people who visit your site. What about a competition giveaway, an online version of the business card in a bowl trick!

Look After And Nurture Your List

We have all signed up to lists only to be bombarded with useless spam. Nothing has me reaching for the unsubscribe button as quickly as being sent constant sales pitches from companies. Try and offer some value when you do email people and engage with them in the long run. I don’t mind getting special offers in places and if they are done correctly they can be very powerful but be careful on not going too hard with the big sell.Like everything you do online try and get away form looking for the big numbers at the start, this is going to be a long term project and something that will evolve over time. Our list is still very small but all being well and if we keep adding value and engaging our list with good content we will be in a position next year where we have over 10,000 people on that list. You should start doing the same!

How To Market Your Business Using Social Media When You Have Zero Budget

Niall Harbison — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:06:53 +0000

We are a start up. We did our first day’s work on the 9th of May 2009 so that makes us a little under a year old. Like most start ups we didn’t have much money to play with and certainly didn’t have a marketing budget. Although we didn’t have a marketing budget we did have to spread the word about our services and let people know that we were here and we have largely done that through social media. We now work with large brands who are starting to see the massive power of social media but I also think that if used correctly and by people who are passionate enough about their product or service social media can be one of the best cheap marketing tools and route to market. I wanted to write this post to share some of the tips and tricks that we used over the first nine months of our business and how social media gave us a boost and allowed us to punch way above our weight…

The Blog

We didn’t have a penny at the start so we sat down and asked ourselves “how can we get our message out to potential customers?” and the answer we came up with was a blog. We started off like any other company does last June with a blank canvas and nothing but ideas in our head. We decided that we wanted to help people, beginners in social media and give them simple tips and resources that although obvious to us and our peers would help new comers to social media immeasurably. We decided to commit early on to 2 posts per day, one each from myself and Lauren which was an incredibly tough schedule. If you estimate that a post took on average an hour we have been spending a combined 12 hours per week blogging. Although a lot of time we justified it by not attending a single business networking event or any other offline activities. 10 months later we have a blog that gets 75,000 visitors per month and growing fast and we find that most of our business comes through this channel. You need to be able to prove that you are knowledgeable in your field and give away as much useful information as possible because if you do it will come back to you many times over. I won’t give you a monetary figure but I will say that the amount of business that has been referred to us by happy readers of this blog is significant. It doesn’t matter what your business is you should simply be blogging in our opinion and showing your expertise.

Conferences

Myself and Lauren have both attended our fair share of conferences here in Ireland and to be honest were bored of what we saw. Social media conferences all had the same message about “listening to your customers” but had very few practical examples where people could learn. We wanted to bring in speakers who knew social media inside out and who could really speak with knowledge. We never set out with the aim of making money from our conferences (we always had the aim of breaking even) but we did use them as a sales channel. If you can bring the right speakers and audience together you have a very receptive audience for your brand. It is very much the same as the blog in that you are building your credibility in your industry as the “go to” people. Think about your industry and how it might benefit from a conference.

Facebook

Facebook is a great way to get started with social media as most people will have a couple of hundred friends that they can tell about their new business. We never really give people the hard sell on Facebook and push our services but we do share little pieces of our work and talk to our couple of thousand fans in a very informal and relaxed manner. We love sending out pictures of what we have for lunch or people who come to visit in the office and find that the people we have as fans are quite engaged as a result. For businesses in the offline world to reach 2000 fans they would have to send out a load of flyers that would cost lots of money but we can do that a couple of times a day for free through our Facebook page. Too many businesses get lazy with the content they push out and only include links to their own blog posts etc but we have found that if you get creative and create some compelling content your fans will start to become a part of your brand.

Video

Video is something that a lot of people get scared of and think that their business should not touch and should perhaps be left to the professionals but we totally disagree with that philosophy and think anybody should give it a go. Reading about us on the blog is all well and good but by watching a video you get a real feeling for what people are like and hopefully the personality and enthusiasm for what you are doing shines through. We make lots of videos and also try and interview key people in the industry so as viewers of the video have even more information that they can learn from and return to. Video is so cheap to produce these days that for a couple of hundred euros you can produce something like this that will get embedded on other sites and push your brand out there…

Twitter

I am not going to lie to you, Twitter is the hardest one on the whole list to master and it will take a lot of time and effort but if done correctly it can be incredibly powerful. The tricky part is that if you think of twitter as a sales tool you won’t get very far but the amount of indirect business and leads that I have had through Twitter in the last year has been massive.The key is following relevant people within your business and engaging with them and adding value to your peers. It took me a couple of months to work out the best strategy on Twitter but just like all the other tips here it is all about how much you put in because the more you help others the more help you will find yourself getting in return.

Does It Work?

Different people will find success marketing themselves in different ways. Some people live attending events but they are not for us. Some people might not enjoy blogging but we love it. The point is that you need to find what is right for you and stick with it! Social media is cheap and allows you to meet people in a fraction of the amount of time that it would take in “the real world”. If you don’t have a budget and things are tight you should have a look into using social media to market your business, it’s hard work but it does work.

Why I love Google Play

Lauren Fisher — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:11:55 +0000

You’ll see from previous posts of mine that I have a fascination with the way that we consume content online, as we look for increasingly efficient and time-saving ways to consume our favourite content online, as well as discovering new content. That’s why I was excited by the launch of Google Play last week.

The way in which you are served content in Play is obviously similar to Stumbleupon , serving you up new sites based on your previous interests and other sites that you’ve ‘liked’. It is a lot more streamlined though, as you don’t have to leave Play in order to receive new content, it serves it to you within the same screen, easily scrolling through visually appealing content. You don’t need an account with Google to use Play, but if you do, it will carry over information based on your previously ‘liked’ content, as well as that of people you follow. If you do use Google Reader, you can view any of your subscribed feeds in play, which provides an altogether more visually pleasing way to consume the content you like.

Now I’m not suggesting that Google Play is now ‘the’ way to view your feeds, nor do I think that’s what Google intend it to be. There is an option to view your subscriptions through Play, if you want. I see it as serving a different purpose however, providing a way to discover new content and quickly scroll through to find new sources of information or entertainment. In a nod to the ipad, it’s also been developed to be ‘tablet PC’ friendly.

I don’t just see this as a pretty way to consume content. I think it’s more than that. It provides a solution to our ‘content overload’ problem. It allows you to discover new sites easily, but without being encouraged to subscribe and return again and again, adding to the problem even further. That’s why I don’t see it as an alternative to Google Reader, which is the home for the sites you repeatedly visit and establish a longer-term relationship with. Play provides that quick fix and the more you play with it, the more you get out of it. You can also clearly see the appeal of browsing the internet in this way, with your most recently visited tabs along the bottom, allowing you to easily switch between tabs and add new ‘favourites’. It would provide an altogether more efficient way to browse online and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this as an option through Chrome, eventually

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Smart Minds And Traditional Media Coverage

Niall Harbison — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:03:17 +0000

Things are getting pretty exciting at Simply Zesty towers with moving in to new offices a couple of weeks ago and now we have 2 of the smartest social media folk on our little island of Ireland coming to join the team. Christian Hughes and Niall Fagan have just come on board and we could not be more excited about expanding our business and taking things to the next level. With social media being such a new discipline we had a very small pool of people to hire from but we are pretty confident that we found 2 of the best people to help drive our business forward. All the paper work has been signed and all we have to do now is make time to get the guys (and our other superstar team member Sarah) down to the beach to get some trendy photo’s like myself and Lauren have at the top of the site. We want to build something really special with Simply Zesty and we think we just found the 2 right guys to take our small young company up a couple of gears.

Some Nice Coverage

Thought we would lump all the good news in to one post and share an article in the business section of The Independent that was published about us today. 3 Business leads from traditional media today, who said it was dead again?

Why You SHOULD Look A Gift Horse In The Mouth

Niall Harbison — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:40:26 +0000

Over the last 3 years I have been immersed in start up life and due to the very nature of the game you often find yourself short of cash and scrambling to do business deals and make a little money out of thin air. Cash is at a premium. During that time I have taken part in all sorts of free work and revenue share deals. There have been advertising revenue splits, content distribution, website builds, free marketing, joint builds of apps etc. The list goes on. I would say nearly 95% of projects that I have taken on have seen no significant return for either side. They were all deals that both parties struck at the time bartering a little work or content in exchange for something in return with both parties hoping to further their own interest but most of the deals fizzled out, why is that?

People like money. It does indeed make the world go around. We know the value of a cup of coffee. We know how much a car costs and most of us would have a fair idea how much a day of our time would cost. We all have a deep connection with money and we respect it. It dictates what we can and can’t do. If I work long hours and don’t waste much money I can treat my friends and go on holidays. When we buy an ice cream we know the value of it, we don’t try to barter or exchange our services in return, it’s a fixed price and everybody comes out of the deal happy.

The problems arise when you start to do work with people when there are no fixed prices and the goal posts are constantly moving. Most work I have done on a revenue share basis or taken on for free has been when I have been promised something by the other party that sounds too good to be true (it more often than not is too good to be true).

Most of us also have a moral commitment to money. If you pay me 100 Euros to dig a hole the chances are I will dig you a hole that I think is deserving of your 100 Euros. The trouble starts when you take the money out of the equation. Ask me to dig a hole and that you will pay me 50% of the revenues from shop that the sign post points to after it is in the hole and the chances are that I will dig the hole for free. What usually happens though is that either the sign is pointing in the wrong direction or the shop is so bad that 50% of the revenues did not even equate to the amount of effort I put in to digging the hole.

I know some revenue sharing deals do work. Just look at Apple and the app store or iTunes. I do however think for small businesses and start ups in particular that the revenue share deals that work are few and far between. It has taken me quite a lot of time to figure out but whenever I am doing business now either selling my wares or buying them from somebody else I prefer to have cash involved.

Run for ActionAid Ireland

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:36:30 +0000

I don’t often write about client projects here on the blog, but this one is a particularly worthy cause that deserves a mention We’ve just started working with ActionAid in Ireland, to help them with their campaign for the Flora Women’s Mini Marathon. They’re looking for ladies in Ireland to run for them in the marathon, to raise money for schoolgirls in Uganda and give them access to clean, safe water. I could tell you all about the project, but a video tells a million words…

Walk and they won’t have to

ActionAid are keen to use social media as part of this project (hence our involvement!) and we’ve set them up with a Twitter account and Facebook page. It’s great for us to see a new organisation so keen to embrace social media and particularly for such a good cause.

Ladies – if you want to get involved, register on the Flora Women’s Mini Marathon site, then email veronica.waters@actionaid.org to receive your free race pack and register with ActionAid Ireland. Then all that’s left to do is get training and fundraising! To help you get race-ready ActionAid are putting on a training session at Fallon & Byrne with the former presenters of the RTE Health Squad programme, on 28th April. We’re also encouraging people to fundraise with a mycharity page. Even if you don’t take part in the run, I hope you enjoy following them online. ActionAid have some great stories to tell and we’re happy to help them build a whole new community through social media.

How To Get Coverage Online Using Images

Niall Harbison — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:23:36 +0000

There are plenty of lazy journalists out there who like to take press releases and copy and paste them to form the basis of their story. It’s easy, the hard work has been done and it means they can get down to their local for a beer once their copy has been filed and the deadline made. Now there is an even better way of getting coverage…designing a slick image with some stats from social networking sites or online services and sending it to tech blogs. This has been going on in the offline world for years with images being sent to newspapers and magazines featuring branded content for years and now people trying to get coverage on social media blogs have figured out that they can stand out from the 100s of other stories by simple getting their graphic designer to knock up a quick image with some stats. The beauty of this method is that you don’t even have to own the service or tool you are doing the image for. Most of the stats on the examples below are simply publicly available information nicely cobbled together by a designer. Have a think about it? Is there a way that you could get all the stats from your site or a service in your country and do something like this? The guys who designed the Google one below have had their logo and URL posted all over the web. It’s a smart way of getting the message out there about your site for the price of a simple little design and crucially when it lands in a journalist or bloggers inbox it will really stand out…

Tumblr Stats

Facebook

Google

Go Easy On Social Media And Blogging Newbies

Niall Harbison — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:49:57 +0000

I was at Wordcamp this weekend and a talk by Darragh Doyle got me thinking about social media and blogging for beginners. It’s very easy when you are immersed in the online world of social media to come out with statements like “just throw up a Wordpress blog” or “open a twitter account and start talking to people”. They feel very easy steps for business owners to be able to make in trying to establish an online presence. I’ll tell you now that they are not. All my work is online, I tap away at a computer for 16 hours a day and live and breath this sort of stuff just like many other people do on Twitter and other social networks, it comes as second nature to many of us but I remember blogging for the first time and sending my first tweet and it is bloody hard at first, daunting even. What I saw as I listened to Darragh’s talk was a room of people who were eager to learn and I could feel the delight as Darragh talked them through it. You could feel the tension ease as people were able to ask simple questions like “who will read my blog” and “how will people find me online” and get the simple answers they were looking for. Child’s play to seasoned internet people but a whole new world to many.

Using Social Media Is Like Driving A Car

Most of us know how to drive. We take it as second nature when we jump in behind the wheel. You hardly need to think about what you are doing and your mind is usually elsewhere as you cruise around on autopilot. It wasn’t that way at the very start though, we all had to learn. You probably had a few lessons or had a friend show you the ropes. Simple skills like changing the gears and parking felt totally alien to us all at the start and we needed to repeat them over and over until we knew how. Social media and using online tools like blogging for your business are no different…

Getting It Wrong

Here is the classic example of how people start. It is one of the biggest supermarkets in Ireland who have clearly heard that twitter is the place to be to increase sales and they have come along, followed 100 people from a list they have found and sent one tweet which is a special offer thinking it will increase their sales. Are they wrong? Yes absolutely. Should they be vilified and slagged off? No not at all, it’s new to whoever is running the account and they’ll figure it out in the long run but at the moment they have just jumped in the car without any training and are getting it wrong. Nobody jumps in to the car for the first time and speeds off around the corner like Jenson Button, most people will stall on their first uphill start. It takes time.

Would You Slag Off A Driving Instructor?

I always hear people giving out about the simplicity of talks like the one Darragh gave at Wordcamp or about blog posts that we write here like 50 resources to improve your blogging or about people “teaching twitter” but the reality is that these sorts of posts and talks are aimed at a totally different audience, the beginners. I saw the look of relief on some people’s faces when Darragh explained what a blog actually was and how people could find your business through your blog, yes it’s obvious to me and you but to some of the trout farmers and hostel owners in the room it wasn’t. As the girls from Beaut.ie (Ireland’s biggest fashion blog) explained earlier in the day their readers don’t have a clue that they are even on a blog, to their readers it is just a website.
I just think we should all take a little time and help people who are starting off like Darragh was in his talk. Sometimes we have a tendency to all sit around and snigger at beginners which would be like Fernando Alonso, Schummacher and Jenson Button sitting in the pit lane in Monaco sniggering at driving instructors. I know some people might take the piss when it comes to teaching services like Twitter but there are also a whole bunch of people out there who don’t know how to tweet, blog, update, share or post videos on Youtube so if you spot somebody like that maybe give them a hand out and nudge them in the right direction instead of slagging them off about their inability to grasp something that you find so simple.

Separating business and pleasure

Lauren Fisher — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:03:58 +0000

Image courtesy of colinjcampbell

At last week’s PR conference in London, Neil Midgley (assistant media editor at The Daily Telegraph) warned journalists and PRs that they shouldn’t be using Facebook for personal reasons, advocating Twitter as a more appropriate ‘professional channel’ where you can easily run personal and professional relationships. He made a clear distinction between the social networks that were appropriate for business and pleasure. I don’t want to take his comments out of context, that were directed just at journalists and PRs, but it raises an interesting wider issue and one that I frequently come across in my day to day use of social media.

It used to be the case that there was very little, if any, crossover between my Twitter followers and Facebook friends. But as my time of using Twitter has progressed, I’m starting to connect with my ‘followers’ through Facebook. Where once I used Twitter from a professional capacity and Facebook was strictly for socialising, this is most definitely starting to change. Now my Facebook feed is filled with interesting links and blog posts, as well as the mix of the usual ’social’ updates from friends. When my communities start to mix in this way, there is less of a distinction and my online community now jumps with me from site-to-site. It’s the style of the content that changes (length, media type etc…) rather than the subject.

As more and more businesses start using Twitter and we become ever increasingly social, there is less of a distinction between personal and professional. I would have to say that I disagree with Neil Midgley. With the exception of a site like LinkedIn, which has a clear business focus, I don’t think we can say that you can easily contain one type of ‘networking’ for one site, where it is more appropriate. Like I said, the style of the content, yes, but not the subject matter or the community you’re engaging with.

Where does one start and the other finish?

Last year I decided not to integrate my Twitter and LinkedIn statuses, both for reasons of repetition, but also because I used LinkedIn for business reasons and this wouldn’t necessarily be overly relevant to my Twitter followers. That is starting to change though. I still haven’t integrated the two because I don’t like to repeat myself over different social networks, but in reality there is a ever-reducing differentiation between the content, as well as there being a reduction in the different followers I have between the sites. It’s not uncommon for me to meet someone new and receive invitations to connect over LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

This is an obvious progression for social media. We are obviously just one person, whether you’re talking about this in terms of offline or online. It is becoming increasingly difficult (and ultimately pointless) to manage different types of ‘you’ over the social networks you use. The more we use social media, the more it becomes necessary for your community to follow you from site to site. As I said in an earlier post, the social networks we use are intangible. The structure and functionality is out of our control. What we can control is the content and the community and we need there to be a solid relationship for this, regardless of which site you’re using. I’m sure not many people would be too keen about their boss seeing drunken pictures on their Facebook page, but we are going to have to progress in our intelligence and realise that our personalities and the way we function online is fluid. And visible. There won’t be places to ‘hide’.

Food Photos On Twitter – Now There’s An App For That

Niall Harbison — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:46:24 +0000

You may have noticed a trend on Twitter since it started of people sharing their food photos. People do it all the time and in Ireland they even started tagging them #foodporn so as users could find them easily. I used to post my food photos on Twitter as well and when people started to enjoy them and comment on them I decided to give them a more permanent Tumblr home so as I could look back over them in the future. See the thing is people love photos on social media (they are easy to view, visual and only a click away) and most people enjoy their food so the combination proved to be a winner. I was always thinking that there could be a better use for all these photos because although great content and a great insight in to different restaurants and hotels at the time the photos are never organized or add value in to the future. Well guess what… now there is an app for that….

Foodspotting App

I have always wondered why services like Foursquare didn’t allow you to take photos of food, it would have been a feature that would have actually got me to use the service as I would have seen that as real value. Thankfully the guys behind Foodspotting have brought 2 areas together that make sense…Food and location and are tapping in to Foursquare’s new API to offer an app that could go a long way. Now all those photos that people want to show off has been turned in to a game based around food discovery which is inherently useful for finding the best looking food in town. The pictures on Twitter and the likes of my blog are great but they have no real purpose but if people start to convert to using this app I could easily see a day where I arrive in a new city and stroll around town looking for food based on the photos of others and my current location.

Will It Work?

It has all the key elements to make it work. People are already carrying out the functionality of the app on Twitter in an informal way. The makers of the app have tried to include some game play to try and copy the success Foursquare have had and the fact that it involves food, something that we eat 3 times a day makes it interesting. It has barely even launched but if the makers of this app get enough users to start using it sharing their food photos they could be on to a winner. Could I see a day where I don’t have a guide book and just walk around town with my phone browsing food photos in the near future? Yes 100%. The revenue possibilities are endless because if they can get enough users on board as you could only imagine that restaurants would be pretty keen to partner up and have their photos appear at the top of the list.

Kickass – The Movie Of The Year

Niall Harbison — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:28:35 +0000

Full disclosure (Universal Ireland Are A Client Of Ours)
We don’t often blog about clients as we just like to keep the blog about social media tips and news from the online world but a combination of a busy couple of days and the burning desire to tell you about something really cool led to this blog post. Now you would probably think that as a client of ours we are of course going to say that this is an incredible movie but it’s not our nature to plug just any old stuff here on the blog and this is actually something that we are blown away to be working on especially as the plot has some strong social media elements.

We were lucky enough to see the movie recently (research) and it was one of those movies where you walked out the door and just said wow! I am not a huge super hero or cartoon fan and was actually thinking it would be just another super hero movie when I went to see it but the mixture of fast paced action and the real novelty of the script left me feeling as if Kick Ass would be a huge cult movie for many years to come. I Think Quentin Tarantino mixed with some superheroes, great script and a few kids thrown in to perpetrate the violence and you are only scratching the surface of this flick. Trust me you are going to love seeing this one and watch out for all the fun stuff lined up around town in the build up to the launch.

Why 2010 Will Be The Remembered As The Year Mobile Social Media Came Of Age

Manchester United Fans Trying To Do “An Obama” With Social Media?

Niall Harbison — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:51:37 +0000

It’s not often that I get to write about my great passion of sport on this blog but I have noticed something brewing around Manchester United and seen a few early signs that merit looking at it further. Without going in to too much detail Manchester United are now owned by some fairly dodgy Americans who seem intent on ruining the club as they plunge it in to over $1 Billion in debt to help line their own pockets. A fans revolt has been brewing for the last couple of years but things seem to have stepped up a little recently and it is not just because fans are getting angrier but just that the protests are getting noticed by more people mainly because the fans have recruited a very powerful force…The team behind Barack Obama’s online election campaign…Blue State Digital.

Who Are Blue State Digital?

Blue Sky Digitial are an Internet marketing, strategy and crucially online fundraising agency who are widely regarded as one of the main reasons that Obama got in to office. Blue State Digital’s campaign for Obama resulted in more than three million individual donors contributing more than $500 million and they have been recruited by the Manchester United fans to do exactly the same sort of job for their club.

Why Would They Do It

Blue State Digital seem to be specialists at mobilizing large groups of people and getting them to rally behind a cause and dig deep in to their pockets. With over 300 Million Manchester United fans all over the world you are looking at an amount of people even larger than the population of America. The Glazer family who own Manchester United are said to have no interest in selling even at a $1 Billion valuation so the cause would seem like an impossible one but some would have said a couple of years ago that it was impossible to elect a black man to the White House.

How Are They Doing It?

Social Media To Spread The Word

The key with this capaign is the social media element and getting the word out to mobilize the group troups (the Manchester United fans) in to action. The mialing list has more than trebled from 30,000 to nearly 90,000 in just a couple of days and the campaign is already starting to feel as if it is taking hold. This will be a long hard slog and many channels will be used over the course of the campaign but early signs are that Blue State Digital are already starting to make some great traction.

Rally the troops

The first thing they have done is to target fans who attend matches by telling them to start donning the colors of the original Manchester United team or green and canary. This will start to hurt the owners in the pocket and crucially get the word spreading from the hard core fans on the terraces out to the millions of fans around the world. For all of Barack Obama’s online presence he was incredibly powerful on television and in the real world so for any campaign to succeed you need that catalyst.

The Money

There have been countless fan revolutions in the past but none that have involved this sort of money. To prize the club away from the Glazers this new movement is going to have to raise north of a Billion and that sort of money is not easily come by. It will be a combination of some institutional money but also fans are expected to be asked to get involved.The number become a little easier when you think that each fan would only have to donate $3 each to raise the billion dolloars.

Will It Work?

Trying to take control of a football club is a very different animal to trying to get somebody elected. The biggest stumbling block is that the owners say the club is not for sale and if they keep that stance there is simple nothing that fan power can do no matter how much money they raise or how well they leverage social media to reach out to the 300 million Manchester United fans. The one thing that is apparent is the need for change and the fact that this very noisy and passionate group of people want change. This was the same emotion that fueled Barack Obama’s run at the white house and with Blue State Digital behind them you never know, the Manchester United fans might just get the change they are looking for.

How To Create An Effective Business Blog

Niall Harbison — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:29:49 +0000

A trend that I have been noticing over he last 6 months is the massive proliferation of business blogs. You used to be able to stand out online if you had a blog but things have changed and it is getting to the stage where you would stand out if you didn’t have a blog. As with most blogs there are good and bad ones and some people take it more seriously than others. There are of course plenty of benefits for a business to have a blog including SEO (appearing for terms around their business in search engines), letting their customers know more about their business or simply as a creative outlet to share ideas and show knowledge in your area. The reasons to get in to business blogging vary greatly but there are some basic rules that you can follow to help engage your customers and create a compelling and exciting blog…

I Don’t Really Care What Awards You Won

Too many companies seem to think their blogs are a place they should post once every three months about the latest award they have won. This really annoys me as they are in effect saying “hey look at us we are amazing” rather than actually trying to add content of real value. I don’t mind seeing a quick post about your achievements as everybody needs a good pat on the back every once in a while from their peers but don’t make it your only blog post.

Have A Timetable

I don’t care if you can only commit to one post a week or even one every couple of weeks the only thing I’d say is make sure that you don’t promise on a posting schedule that you can’t deliver. There is nothing worse than starting to enjoy a blog only for the business not to update it for weeks. We all get busy but having a schedule and sticking to it are important as there is nothing worse than landing on a blog and seeing that the company has not bothered to update it for 3 months, that sort of scenario is actually doing more harm than good in my opinion.

Share Your Data

Sharing your data is one of the smartest things that you can do in a blog post in my opinion. By doing so you are offering your readers something of real value and something that they will return to on a consistent basis. Some of the best posts like here, here and here are from businesses that I would normally have little or no interest in (health sector and property website) but because the blog authors have created something of real value to myself and other readers I am now subscribed to their blog and checking in for regular updates.

Let Your Personality Shine Through

Nobody really wants to read a blog written by a company logo. They want to read a blog that has a person behind it, a big of personality. We do that here with myself and Lauren where we try to bring the personality of the company through in our writing and people hopefully enjoy hearing the voices of the people who are running the company. It doesn’t even have to be the people who run the company who blog as lots of other employees from different areas within the company will have an interesting story to tell as well. Identify the right person within your organization and start letting their knowledge shine through.

Forget The Hard Sell

I see so many people trying to make a quick buck on their blogs by giving out constant special offers or even running ads on their blog. Sure you need to think about your blog as a sales channel but it needs to be done as subtly as possible and all of the sales that you make will most probably come indirectly and come after you have built up a certain amount of trust with your readers.

Be Patient

I see the same pattern with nearly every business blog I see emerge. It goes….Great start, lots of shouting about new blog, posts every couple of days, no comments or interaction, posts once a month, no more posts, blog dies. It’s amazing just how many times this repeats itself and the reason for this is that people need to realize that it takes time. You are going to have to have a lot of patience as it will take months of consistency to get you a following. Don’t give up like most others after a couple of months when you don’t see a sudden spike in sales.

Write About Your Passion Not For SEO

I have seen so many blogs where people try to pump out lots of content that is just copy and pasted videos, links or just content that has been lifted from other sites and given a new slant but although this may be a quick fix you are just not going to be able to build up community and a following around your blog by following those sorts of principles. You need to write from the heart about something you are passionate about (If you are not passionate about your own business then you have a totally different problem)

Is there something rotten in the state of the internet?

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:35:37 +0000

Image courtesy of UltraBobban

According to Richard Dawkins, there is. Following a series of fairly hateful posts on a forum on his site, he withdrew the discussion board and posted on his blog that he felt there was “something rotten in the internet culture”. Given that one commenter said he wanted to ram a fistful of nails down his throat, you can see where he’s coming from. So does Dawkins have a point? Is there something inherently rotten in our internet culture? There are a few interesting points from this discussion that are worth looking at further.

One of the clear things that Dawkins takes issue with, and I have to side with him here, is the reference to language. He questions why there is the need for such over the top language and in a tone that he describes as sometimes ‘hysterical’. Anyone who has read the comments for pretty much any youtube video, can’t help but agree with him here. But youtube aside, which seems to have spawned it’s own subculture of inane, irrational and spiteful comments, he does also have a point when it comes to the language that’s used online. I’ve been on the receiving end of some pretty hurtful stuff myself and I’ve seen others go through worse. Sure, you eventually learn to accept it, you become almost desensitised. The thing is that this can sometimes come from people you know ‘offline’ and the tone and language used for some of their online communication can often seem like it’s coming from a different person altogether.

Hiding behind the wall

The anonymity factor is clearly at play here, to an extent. Sure, when no-one can trace you, you can voice your inner most thoughts and angers, no matter how hateful they may be. But anonymity in itself is not sufficient enough an explanation. You can often see people who are in no way trying to hide who they are, acting in a completely different way and sometimes in a more unpleasant way than how they normally would. Or how you could conceive anyone acting towards someone else, especially people they don’t know. I want it to be clear that I’m not talking trolls here, but rather the more general way in which we conduct ourselves and communicate online.

Whether you’re being transparent or not, there is a clear comfort in the ‘wall’ between you and the internet. No matter how much you try to be yourself online, there is always that level of knowledge that you have time to write out what you want to say, that you can self-correct, self-censor. That you can say what you want without the risk of an immediate response or a need to make eye contact. You can turn the screen off and ignore it, if you so wish. Or you can compose yourself for the next comment. Lately I have found myself thinking more than I usually would before sending a tweet or writing something on Facebook. I’ve found myself going to say things that I would normally never say to someone, and I have always tried to be the same person offline as I am online. I’m finding myself getting increasingly drawn into this habit of mouthing off about individuals or companies and using language I never normally would. And I check myself before I do it, because being that way just isn’t me. So what is this strange thing that happens online, that allows you to become almost a different person, at times unrecognisable to the people that know you?

Is it really as bad as Dawkins suggests? Is it something rotten with the internet that encourages us to be like this? I wouldn’t go so far as to describe it in the way that he has, but you can’t ignore the fact that online, people can become quite nasty. This isn’t to say that it’s the internet that’s making people act this way, that it is in some way responsible as a medium (you won’t find me burning copies of Child’s Play here) but it is a fascinating insight into human behaviour, in that it’s allowing us to access a whole new level of communication and act in a different way. We’ve always had written communication, but never with the immediacy of the internet or social media. The fact that it can bring out such different sides of people , both good and bad is affecting not only how we communicate, but is spreading out into entire industries.

To come back to Dawkins’ post, there is something else interesting in what he says. Not the fact that the internet can bring out this ‘hysterical’ behaviour that he discusses, but the act that brought this about. The issue in question was that Dawkins was making changes to the existing forum on his website. Something that, I think, he unfortunately plays down too much. The difference was in changing it from being an open forum, to one that would be moderated. To the extent that starting a new discussion would require approval. Even though I don’t agree with the treatment Dawkins received online, it is understandable why some would have reacted badly to this. Even though he claims it is his right as the owner and editor of the site to extend this editorial control. This is not, however, the function of a forum. It is a discussion. One that should be open and free from control (libel etc.. notwithstanding).

But further still the problem is not so much the editorial control Dawkins was inflicting, but the fact that he was making changes to an already thriving community forum. I feel it is expertly summed up in this post, in a thread unfortunately titled ‘Richard Dawkins is a dick‘

“It may sound ridiculous to those not involved with online communities, but I feel hurt and displaced. It was like coming home to find the locks have been changed.”

Even for those not involved in online communities, it is a pretty compelling and understandable argument. This guardian article also provides further interesting insight into how the old forum moderators were treated. Not all that nicely.

So here we have two incredibly interesting insights into the way we function both as individuals online and how we act within our wider communities. It is evident that Richard Dawkins was in the wrong. Not for wanting to exert editorial control on his own site, but for thinking he could do that and in any way still call it a forum. Our online communities and behaviours are something that we hold quite close to us. Just wait for Facebook to make a change to their site and see the ensuing ‘petition’ to change it back. This is not wholly unreasonable and is a reflection of how we function online. In many cases we conduct a large portion of our lives through an environment that someone else ‘owns’. We have no control over it, it is physically intangible so changes like the one that Dawkins made shouldn’t be overlooked. Bearing this in mind also provides an insight into the language and general tone with which we carry out our online communication. Online our words are all we have. There’s no subtle body language, no hints and no real tone of voice. But inn lieu of these subtleties do we resort to nasty, intimidating language to get our point across?

When all you have is words, every one counts.

Are You A Social Media/Internet Addict?

Simply Zesty» – SimplyZesty

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Is there something rotten in the state of the internet?

Hiding behind the wall

“It may sound ridiculous to those not involved with online communities, but I feel hurt and displaced. It was like coming home to find the locks have been changed.”

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