Open Government: exploring the impact of social media

Yesterday, together with my friend Gege Gatt,  I gave a talk to a COMNET-IT workshop meeting in Malta.  It was interesting to see public servants start to scramble for their 3G phones and laptops at the end.

Here’s the deck of slides we presented.

Here comes the next Google wave

Video of  Google Wave Developer Preview presentation Keynote of Google I/O. There is more information here.

First break all the rules

I was first attracted to this book by both the title, and the fact that it was co-written by Marcus Buckingham, a proponent of the ’strengths’ philosophy that I have embraced in the work place.

This is a deck of slides I have compiled for the Alt-MBA group that has spun out of Seth Godin’s Triiibes.

UPDATE:  Slideshare selected this as a featured presentation.  Nice to know it resonated with some.

The Web is just 5,000 days old

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that what we now take for granted is very young.  Here, Kevin Kelly outlines his vision for Web 3.0 and other things wonderful.  Kevin’s blog is always a source of inspiration.

IFA comes to town

I’ve spent the past 2 days immersed in the IFA Press Conference in Malta.   I first heard the Conference was coming to Malta when I picked up a tweet from Steven Leon from ShowStoppers on my ‘Malta’ search column on TweetDeck.  We exchanged a couple of 140-character tweets with links to our blogs and before you know it we were immersed in a conversation on logistics, technology and local interest.  Who says social media and Twitter in particular is not useful for making real life connections?

Steven introduced me to Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies.  I spent a fascinating 20 minutes listening to Tim’s unique insights on personal computers and the next wave of computer technology developments.  ”I’ve been through seven recessions since I joined the company in 1981,” said Tim.  ”Every time there’s a recession, technology companies always emerge stronger.  Sure, there is correction and weaker companies fall by the wayside.  But I expect the same thing to happen again at the end of this recessionary cycle”.

Tim’s closing remarks at the IFA Press Conference are in the video below.  It’s worth your three minutes.

Yours socially

A CEO recently told me he had an inkling he needed to get his brands on ‘some of those social media things’ but that he had no idea where to start, or whether social media marketing worked.

In contrast, Andrew Alamango of Etnika fame sold out two nights of Café Brazil jazz last autumn using Facebook as the primary means of marketing the event. Historic house museum Palazzo Falson, which has been on Facebook only a month, says it ‘could not resist the irony of having an ancient house with a strong presence on the most happening social network site’. It appears that those with little or no marketing budget are more inclined to investigate, and invest time in social media channels than potentially more cash-rich businesses.

But social media is nothing new. From internet’s earliest days, we’ve had chat, forums, message boards and virtual worlds. Today, blogs, podcasts, social networks, photo- and video-sharing sites, RSS (really simple syndication) and more, all fall within its scope. We now talk to each other by posting on a Facebook wall, uploading a video on YouTube and ‘Twittering’ about our every move. Even websites’ pre-eminence is being whittled away. Search engines pick up well-tagged blogs rather than website urls. Your homepage is now wherever someone lands when they search for you.

Little of this has, until now, interested business, particularly local business in Malta. But, when Dell has a senior Vice-President Communities & Conversations, you know that social media is moving up a gear and becoming more mainstream as a business tool. Today, any entity used to mediating and controlling its publics will have to face this paradigm shift and engage in online conversations if it is to stay relevant to its audiences.

But social media for business is not without a learning curve. There are some basics to get right, if you want to join the conversations and gain.

Get closer to your clients

Social media is about understanding customer nature, and nurturing it. Consumers today prefer to read and listen to opinions about products and services from fellow consumers and their peers. If you are going to use social media, don’t interrupt their natural conversations with corporate spin and one-way marketing messages. You need to foster a valued, trusted, authentic voice to get heard in the babble.

Listen to some home truths

On social media, your customers tell it to you straight. Dell discovered from its Twitter presence that people thought its customer support centre was abysmal. It took measures to improve the service based on the customer gripes it picked up on Facebook comments. Better to know than not know.

Market cost-effectively

In a recession, social media becomes more important simply because barriers to entering it are zero. It costs nothing to set up and manage a Facebook page or to Twitter; only your time. You can monitor return on investment though, as social media has readily-available metrics. Start low-key and learn what works.

Engage with purpose

Find people who are passionate about social media within your organisation. Let your social media-savvy employees do their bit on your behalf, but as themselves. Palazzo Falson has two staff members with responsibility for its Facebook page, and, according to the curator, they are doing a great job.

Enter social media conversations wisely

Ryan Air heard disgruntled customers moaning about it on Twitter, and entered the fray publicly on the medium giving all customers a cocky brush off. Within an hour, the Ryan Air ‘Tweets’ had been pulled, probably by a senior executive who thought a junior’s hasty responses ill advised. Social media is about immediacy, but think before you post or tweet.

Don’t socialise everywhere

Your goal should be to fish where your fish are. You don’t have to touch each conversation, but you need to be having one or two, because whether your business realises or not, it’s on social media already. Your name is being bandied about as any Google search will show you.

Lastly…see your customers as your allies, not just as people to sell to. They are your real brand value, so value their online conversations about you and with you.

How to use social media to search for your tribe

I’ve recently took on an engagement to be the founding editor of a monthly technology supplement for the Sunday Times of Malta, the leading newspaper in my country.  The first edition of Technology Sunday is out tomorrow.  I’m passionate about content and all things digital and the Times is a good brand to be associated with.

My immediate challenge was to quickly find people who could a) write well  b) quickly c) with authority d) with insider local knowledge on e) a range of issues – from telecoms to gadgets to social media to the intersection of life and anything deemed digital and f) for no money!

I decided to rely exclusively on social media to search for like-minded people.  I also wanted to find people who were not professional media journalists.  Unconsciously, I was starting to look for members of a new tribe, who wanted to engage and collaborate on a project on the basis of trust and a common objective.

These are some observations I made as I assembled my writing team:

1. Start with Facebook.  If like me you do not have thousands of ‘friends’, it is fairly easy to filter down on the handful of potential writers.  Look at the way they engage online.  It’s fairly easy to sort out who can write and who can’t.
2. Continue with LinkedIn.  You can now home in on specific skills sets.  Look at how active people are in groups; see if they answer questions and help others.  LinkedIn is adding plenty of new features and groups are really getting a lot of traction.
3. Use Twitter’s own advanced features.  This post is very useful if you want a web-based application.  In my case, I used TweetDeck to monitor who was active in my space, and spent some time looking at blogs.  I also tweeted a question, asking if people were interested in joining the quest.  I started to get followers.
4. You could also use some customised applications.  This tool, called the UGC finder, for instance, is targeted at journalists.
5. I leave the obvious till last – use Google.  I guess the fact that this is last is indicative of how search is becoming more specialised, perhaps more human – where word of mouth is as important as an algorithm.   Or a reflection of how we are constantly looking for short-cuts in our time-poor lives.

I met people in my office or in cafe’s,  and held many an online conversation with writers I had never heard of.   I guess the acid test is tomorrow.  But the process has already paid off, as far as I’m concerned.  I have met some great people, learned how to generate specialist content quickly and cost-effectively and applied social media tools for a specific task.

And perhaps that is where the lesson lies – that if you are very focused on your objectives before you start to apply social media, you can get relatively quick results.  Like most things in life, it helps having a clear strategy before you dive into trying to get something done.  And that applies as much to a business, as to a 24-page technology supplement.

Everybody’s fumbling with Social Media

I’m finalising my slides for a presentation on social media for SMEs next Friday.  As I try and wade through the ’social media’ column on my TweetDeck to pick up the latest conversations on the subject, there seems to be a number of common threads:

1.  Early adopters of social media tools are up in arms on new entrants claiming to be ’social media marketers.’  The consensus seems to be that unless you update a blog regularly (for yourself and others), manage a Facebook group, and twitter regularly (for yourself and others) and (here’s the US hook) have advised some Fortune 100 company on social media marketing, you’re not really cut to be a social media marketer.  (I find this particularly amusing, as I believe social media is essential for SMEs to reach way beyond their physical and economic budgeting / marketing / logistical restrictions to connect with entirely new customer segments).

2.  Then again, large companies also apparently get it wrong.  Watch this.

3.  Evan Williams has waded in on mainstream US TV to explain how Twitter works, and why they did not take Facebook’s money.

4.  There is clearly a sense of comedy in the confusion of what Twitter is all about, seeing it defies the basic business tenet of ROI.  Jon Stewart saw a great opportunity to explain.

5.  In the meantime, more sign of the times:  some hope social media will get them a job.  Others are still in Obama mode and are focusing on how social media can create change.

My advice?

Ignore all advice.  Or take the most simple:  

1. Listen.

2. Set up.

3. Participate.

4. Engage.  

5. Network.  

6. Build Something together.

7. Repeat.

And the sting in the tail?  It’s not totally free, it’s not instant karma and yes.. you may need some help.  Business Week still nailed it.

When Gmail went down: sheer poetry

As I write this, Gmail has been down for over five hours.  I’m still looking at a ‘502 server error’ message’ in Malta, though some people are saying the service is slowly coming back to life.  It’s something quite unprecedented.  The news broke early on Twitter, as the eager, connected social media types tried to access email, and drew a blank.

In 140-character speak, there are already some great nuggets as we get to terms with cloud computing failing:

@jackschofield:  Cost of outage: 100 million users x $50 per hour x 5 hours = $25 billion. Make your own guesses

@helenawaldron:  Thank heavens for little twitterers who explain why my gmail isn’t working – fingers crossed it’s back soon!

@twoon:  using google to find an alternative login for gmail ; the irony almost kills me

@TechCrunch:   Trouble In The Clouds: Gmail Turns Into Gfail

@Cocco00:  Microsoft must really be enjoying this gmail fiasco

@noplay:  Give Gmail a break and enjoy the silence

It’s actually been quite fun reading these tweets!  I just wonder whether with time, this will be deemed to be an isolated, 9/11 type incident or the shape of things to come:  when cloud computing started to go pear-shaped.

Getting to grips with Twitter

I signed up to Twitter ages ago.  Like many people, I dipped my toes into the medium, read that Seth Godin did not use it, and ‘politely’ ignored it.

I had a major rethink about social media since we started working in earnest on our new ‘Tribes’ project.  And the penny dropped.  Twitter is really indispensable if you are interested in change, branding, marketing and connecting with like-minded people.  

The only downside I’ve found till now is that the ’signal to noise’ ratio on Twitter is high – once you immerse yourself, it is a) difficult to let go and focus on ‘real’ (paid?) work and b) you have to really sift the  ’valuable’ stuff from the mundane.  There are also ethical issues to navigate – do you follow everyone who follows you?  is the objective to gain a following or just to listen and occasionally engage?  It’s a social medium after all.  My view, till now, is to reciprocate a follow.

Here are some tools, articles and links I used as I got started with Twitter:

1. MANGING TWITTER. You cannot understand how Twitter works without TweetDeck.   Once you sign up to Twitter, download TweetDeck, start searching for a couple of topics you are interested in and just ‘listen’ to conversatons.   Here’s a useful post on how to use TweetDeck to its full potential.  If you are going to have multiple Twitter IDs, then Twhirl is indispensible. 
2. TO FOLLOW & BE FOLLOWED.  Soon, you will decide who you want to follow.  Use Mr. Tweet to help you follow the right people in your areas of interest.  And to start thinking of how you can attract potential followers.
3. USING TWITTER FOR BUSINESS.  There’s a great webinar by Hubspot on how to use Twitter for Marketing & PR.  It’s actually a great primer on how Twitterworks.  Chris Brogan has a good post on how to use Twitter for business.  Copyblogger follows suit.  Guy Kawasaki also wades in with his views on how he has made it to the top 10 of Twitter greats.
4. ENGAGING.  You have to engage.  You have to be human.  You cannot be in sales mode.  You need to be credible.  You need to add value.  @umarketing said the Five Steps of Twitter Success are : Follow, Reply, Retweet, Share, Repeat.  If you still have doubts on who to follow, read this.  Just google your specific area of interest + twitter.  Here’s an example of how lists of ‘most useful digital marketeers to follow on Twitter’ are compiled.
5. USING.  If you have a blog, you can use twitterfeed to automatically feed your post to Twitter.   Put a ‘tweet this’ button at the end of every post.  You can user Twitter to find a job, to find friends, to have a laugh, to resarch, to keep tabs on your customers, competition and markets.  Some people even think you can use it to get things done.  

There are plenty of articles and resources on how to become ’successful.’  And plenty of advice on what to say, how to present yourself.  I guess we are still at a stage where a lot of people are trying to work out how to extract maximum value out of Twitter.  

The best advice is the most obvious, from Kevin Rose, about not getting sucked into a numbers game.  Don’t work on getting more followers – work on being more useful.

And as for Seth Godin not using Twitter:  he doesn’t need to.  There are already enough people on Twitter tweeting about him, his brilliant book ‘Tribes’, and helping him build his personal brand and make invaluable connections.