Got this great email from Bronwyn Hargraves, who’s a marketing officer at Aoraki Polytechnic, as well as an avid fan of iJump (thanks, Bronwyn!). There’s a great insight in here:

“We were having a discussion in marketing class yesterday about promotion, control and communication…. and it got me thinking!

Companies often don’t jump in to social media tools because they are worried about control. They prefer traditional advertising media – tv, billboards etc because they are seen as the safe controllable option.

Yes, you have control of the message that goes out to your customers, or partners but how much control do you have over how that message is received? Was it received?

With mediums like social media, sure there is no control over what messages you may receive back, but this feedback gives you the opportunity to check if your message was interpreted as you intended, and if it wasn’t, you now have an opportunity to respond back. This will ensure an area of shared meaning is established, and ultimately gives you more control over your advertising.”

Thanks again Bronwyn, for your ideas as well as your avid fan-ship of our updates!

Is Bronwyn right? Does letting go actually give you more control? We think so, but we’d love to hear your experiences in this area.

(Photo courtesy of renatotarga. Thanks!)

A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to live-tweet the Unitec Forum for the Future, where a panel of guests debated and discussed New Zealand’s strategy to catch up with Australia by 2025.

It wasn’t just the panel debating, it was the audience in the room, and also out in the twittersphere. The forum continues this Thursday, covering the tourism industry’s strategic response.

If you can’t make it to Mt Albert, you can participate virtually via Twitter. Follow @UnitecFTF and use the hashtag #unitecftf when asking questions or offering comments. It’s a great way to be inside the conversation, even when you’re not there.

(Marie’s started her own Posterous blog at marieyoung.posterous.com. Here’s her second post:)

Have you ever been to a meeting and you talk about the people who aren’t in the room?

And there’ll be good reasons why these people you talk about aren’t in the room.  It’s not convenient, they’re located in another branch, they may not be in the Executive team or they may be the customer.

If you ever want to understand your customers more, stop and remember the frontline people.  These people are usually forgotten, their role is usually not deemed as an important one, they tend to be the last people who get briefed on any new activity or campaign.

The front line people are usually the receptionist or the customer service team. Imagine inviting some of your superstars to your next meeting.   They hold a container worth of insight, feedback and dare I say innovative ideas from working alongside the customer. They are they ones who help and listen to what your customers are saying day in and day out.

Sadly, the only time these frontline people are listened to is when they have an annual review or monthly if they’re fortunate.

If you don’t have a way of engaging and capturing these gems in your organisation, come up with a simple internal platform that encourages them to do so. Being listened to is a universal need. It’s what comes out of the listening that will surprise you!

How are you harnessing the talent within your organisation?

Do you disrespect your customers when you call them targets? When you launch campaigns at them?

It may just be a matter of words, but words are important.

The language of traditional marketing is the language of warfare. Targets, campaigns, launches and even people in the front line.

What should we use instead? I don’t know if we have the perfect word, but how about starting with the concept of partner.

And in practice, what do we do differently to reach a partner (rather than a target audience)?

Ghost tweeting – where a communications or marketing person tweets on behalf of a CEO or celebrity – got an airing in the Herald on Sunday today.

I got quoted in the story. I’m not really sure the irony shows when I’m called a guru:

Social media guru Simon Young said ghost-Tweeting “might be needed as a transitional thing, but it’s ultimately not sustainable”.

Twitter should be a “conversation”, said Young, between real people.

Some more thoughts that didn’t make it into the final article:

• Who says a CEO should tweet in the first place? Sure, they run the company, but is that relevant to the customer? Instead, empower some front line people within the company who can offer genuine value to customers – that might be customer service, it could be specials, it could be infotainment, or it could be genuine, stimulating conversation (as opposed to “conversation”!). It all depends on the business, the customers, and the value that’s exchanged.
• Of course, that’s a little bit more complicated than just putting a virtual mic in front of the CEO, but that’s the nature of fundamental change. Isn’t it time to start figuring out what your company should look like in revolutionary times?
• Here’s what it might look like: a team of people with different departments and disciplines, but one passion – the customer.
• The skills they will need: a mix of talking (communications, marketing, IT) and listening (customer service, knowledge management) and, most importantly, the ability to learn and adapt quickly.
• A great idea Laurel Papworth shared with me at Marketing Now: find the person in your contact centre who causes the most trouble because they’re too loud, or spend too much time in conversation with clients, and get them on social media. Being a bit of a show-off in a call centre can be a problem, but for social media it may be just right.

(Ghostly pic from peasap)

What social media has been missing for a while is the ability to easily segment your network. Facebook allows you to create lists, but Twitter and LinkedIn have dragged the chain … until now.

Twitter is slowly rolling out a lists feature, that lets you put your contacts in specific lists. You’ve been able to do this already using desktop apps like Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck, but it’s great to have this built-in to the service itself.

What would be even better – particularly for larger networks – is intelligent segmenting. For instance, sometimes I’d just like to see my contacts who are in New Zealand, but at the moment I have to manually create a list. Still, it’s a good start.

LinkedIn has also introduced lists as part of its paid service, one of the first features I’ve seen that makes me seriously consider upgrading my account.

The way they’ve rolled it out is clever, too. Underneath all the usual options (Add this person to your network, Forward this profile, etc) there’s “Save [Name]’s profile”. You get the opportunity to sign up for a 30-day trial, after which I don’t think many people will turn back.

Nice one, LinkedIn!

Experimented upon!

Yesterday we were part of an experiment in collaboration, along with a group of senior executives and business owners as part of On-BRAND Partners‘ Executive Stretch er, thingy (programme? session? it was good, anyway!)

The exercise: brainstorm the bank of the future, in three separate groups, in three separate locations. We had On-BRAND’s internal forum to use for collaboration, as well as whatever else we could use.

“Whatever else we could use” for Marie and I meant Twitter. And yet we got very different results.

My results first, because they were appalling.

I tweeted the question: “In a collaboration exercise. Our question: if you run a small organisation, what do you need from a bank?”

I got three responses. And two of them were jokes!

Why?

Maybe Marie’s approach will give us a clue. She began by tweeting:

Hi Tweeps, I’m with a group of Executives, they’d like to ask you what would you like to see change in our banks?

She got around 30 replies! And to her credit, she kept both conversations going, online and off. How do you do that? Here’s what she did:

• Summarised replies coming in (eg: @Twonetweet Banks making less profit and really care for customers is another hot topic being discussed now)
• Asked clarifying questions
• Gave context. At the beginning, she said she was with a group of executives. At the end, she said “Thanks everyone for your feedback. These guys are staggered by your real time responses ”
• She also didn’t mention that it was an experiment. The way you say something is often as important than what you say.
  

And they were. Marie’s demonstration of the power of collaboration over a distance was better than any two hour presentation. And my poor showing was proof that it’s not about the technology, it’s about who’s using it.

We are being watched! By us!!

Since we started giving presentations on social media in 2007, we’ve been saying get transparent, or transparency will come to get you.

Brands in Public and Google Sidewiki are two ways that this transparency is actively coming to get brands.

Brands in Public brings together everything people are saying about a brand across the social web. Similar to Twitter search, but across other social networks as well. Similar to an internal monitoring solution like Dialogix or Radian6, but public.

Google Sidewiki, meanwhile, lets people comment on your website (or any website), whether you have commenting facility or not.

Brands in Public has already been criticised as potential blackmail, while Google Sidewiki has been called game-changing.

I think Sidewiki will be game-changing in the long term. But it’s not a new idea. Feedly and Friendfeed have allowed people to see what others have said about a site for over a year now (at least it feels like that long). But both of those products are fairly niche, and even though Sidewiki is from Google, it will probably be niche to start off with as well.

That’s great news! It means you – and I – have time to prepare for a genuinely transparent web, where the conversation about our brand is everywhere.

It’s no longer about achieving total control. Instead, it’s how to embrace the risk, and let go sensibly.

What are you struggling with in the area of transparency? Are you in a large organisation where it’s a major cultural hurdle, or are you a one-person business engaging in social networking, and not sure where the line is on personal vs. business voice?

Love to hear your experience.

How do you launch a social media campaign?

You’ll know my easy answer if you saw my Marketing Now presentation – that social media is a commitment, not a campaign. But how do you make the first step in that commitment?

That’s the topic I’m tackling this Friday at Search Engine Boot Camp. I’ll be joined by some great speakers covering other aspects of search and social media. Hope to see you there! Register here.

Twitter = more than just what’s for breakfast

Perhaps predictably (as a social media consultant), I disagree with Patrick Kershaw’s verdict on Twitter in the NZ Herald this morning.

Twitter’s a fad, he says, and reaches so few relevant people as to be a big money-losing time suck.

Not sure where you’re getting your numbers (perhaps less than 250,000 users worldwide?) from, Patrick, but I read in Emarketer that Twitter predicts 18 million Twitter users in 2010.

Patrick also emphasises the importance of controlling others’ perception of you:

I believe it will become a science to manage your online presence, so that what people can find online is exactly what you want them to see. This goes for businesses as much as it does for individuals. And as Twitter is a very public forum, it goes directly against the rules I have for controlling my online presence.

He’s right that it’s a science (not just will be, online reputation management is already quite a science), he’s wrong that it’s possible – or even useful – to completely control it.

That’s because the revolution that we’re in the midst of thrives on transparency. The technology that’s being developed, and the culture that we’re forming, highly values authenticity and transparency.

Of course, that’s easy to say and hard to define. Everyone needs to reach their own comfort level with privacy, so they’re running the technology, not the other way around. It is possible to use Twitter in a small, private group, by protecting your updates. Not recommended, but absolutely possible.

That’s my two cents. NZBen has written a very gracious reply to Patrick on his blog, and it packs a punch, especially considering Ben was a Twitter sceptic once.

Also, some practical advice from Claire and GetFrank, two small NZ businesses using – and benefiting from – Twitter.

Ok, that’s my social media consultant, predictable-as-rain-in-Auckland answer. What’s yours? What did Patrick get right?