Jun 27

Will Facebook never learn?

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Facebook, Social Media

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As a social media consultant I spend a lot of time advising businesses on how to get maximum benefit from Facebook – and it really is, or should be, a key part of your marketing strategy.   To do this I have to stay on top of the deluge of changes that Facebook issue every week, and just occasionally I need to warn people of the unintended consequences of Facebook’s actions.   This week has provided a vivid example of that.

Back in April when Timeline was being rolled out Facebook gave everyone an email address – mine is martyn.stead@facebook.com.   So what?  Not many people chose to use Facebook as an email platform so even if they were aware of this they ignored it.

This week, without notification, Facebook decided to replace the individual email addresses of all 900 Million users with their facebook.com address.    That means that if someone checks your personal profile to contact you via email, the email will be intercepted and turned into a Facebook message.   Personally, if I want to send someone a Facebook message I will use the message function – if I wanted a private email exchange I would not use Facebook messages for it.

Reaction from users has been almost unanimously horrified – this story from the BBC News website is typical: BBC News.   Sophos have reacted by saying that this change raises serious security issues: Sophos

So, how do you reclaim your personal email?   The process is simple, just follow these steps:

Firstly, on your personal profile, click on Update Info below and to the right of your cover photo:

Facebook Cover Photo

Next, locate the Contact Info box:

Contact Info

You will note that it shows my facebook.com email address

Click on Edit and it shows your email addresses:

You will see that the facebook.com email address has an open circle to the right of it, whereas my other email addresses have a line through the circle.  This means that the facebook.com address shows on Timeline, the others are hidden.

On the pull-down arrows next to the circle, select “Hidden from Timeline” next to the facebook.com address

and then against the email address you want to show publicly, select “Shown on Timeline”:

Click “Save Changes” and you’re done.

If an outside agency intercepted your private email in what is called in hacking circles a “Man In The Middle” attack it would be viewed as criminal behaviour.  Let’s be generous to Facebook and say that this move comes from arrogance rather than malign intent – but now that they are a public company they have institutional investors to worry about, and it’s unlikely that those investors will be too happy with Mark Zuckerberg over this bad publicity.   Maybe they will learn a lesson from here on?

This post was first published on The Social Media Bureau blog

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Dec 17

Google Plus; ready for take-off?

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Social Media

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Google Plus set for take off

Since the launch of Google + in the summer, there has been a lot of debate about whether it’s really a “Facebook-killer” or yet another Google attempt to get into social media that is doomed to fade away.

I came across this interesting blog from Social Media Examiner that I’d like to share: Why Google+ Will Become a Powerhouse

What do you think?

New dawn or damp squib?

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Jul 05

Twitcleaner – an impressive software tool

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Reviews

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Twitter Cleaner

In my last blog here I talked about the anti-social (and ridiculous) nature of using an automated system like Truetwit to validate whether Twitter followers were human.   That may have given the impression that I’m totally against automation tools, but not a bit of it.

As with all such things, it’s not the tool, it’s the use you make of it. Just as some people have a digital SLR camera and never take it off the automatic settings, you’ll only get the best out of a tool if you use it with intelligence.

One tool I’ve been very impressed with recently is Twitcleaner, a far better way of weeding out those problem tweeps who clutter your timeline with nonsense than asking tem to take eye-tests.

When you are following a lot of people you end up hardly ever looking at your Twitter timeline, focusing only on @Mentions, lists, hashtags and Direct Messages – and that means that quality control inevitably suffers. Looking for a good way to prune my 13,000 plus followers so that I could concentrate on quality rather than quantity, I turned to Twitcleaner.

Sign on to Twitcleaner with your twitter username and it will run a report on the people you’re following, analysing their behaviour into refreshingly honest categories (I particularly liked “Trying to sell you crap” and “Self-obsessed”) so that you can spot which ones are dodgy, whether because they are Bots, boring or those idiots who post nothing but links. You can unfollow up to 500 people a day from the report, and (provided you use the old grey matter judiciously) your timeline will soon get much clearer again.

What’s more, it will also analyse your own tweeting style and suggest where improvements could be made.

Yes, it gets a definite 10 out of 10 from me.

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Jun 09

Anti-spam or anti-social?

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Social Media

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An increasing number of people on Twitter seem to be using services like Truetwit in the belief that this will stop them being inundated with spam.  But is this anti-spam or anti-social?

Try to follow one of these users and you will get an automatic message back requiring you to visit a website and take  an eye-test masquerading as a security mechanism just to prove you’re human and not a robot.   If you manage to pass, you can then follow that user.  Superficially, that sounds sensible – but is it?

Why would anyone want to stop a person – or indeed a robot – from following them?

After all, it’s not your followers that fill your timeline with rubbish, it’s the people you follow; and Truetwit won’t help you there.   What’s the worst that could happen if a robot follows you?   Your tweets end up on their timeline.  So what?

The real filter that’s necessary is one to prevent you from following spammers, and the best way of doing that is to use the grey matter between your ears.   I’ll follow you if you look interesting, but keep bombarding me with get-rich-quick schemes or gushing tweets about “Awesome Software” and you’ll be unfollowed before you can blink.   (After many years in the IT industry, I am firmly of the opinion that software is binary, it only comes in two kinds – stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t.  None of it is awesome.  I digress).

When involved in any kind of communication, and Twitter is just one such medium, it’s important every now and again to check for interference – is the message that was received the same as the message you transmitted?

Use a validation mechanism like Truetwit and I guess you’re transmitting “I want to protect my Twitter feed from spam, so please validate that you’re human and then we can be friends”.   Unfortunately, what I receive is “I am so important and influential that you will have to jump through hoops to get the benefit of my wise words”.

Maybe that wouldn’t be quite so bad (although still arrogant) if there was any logic in using Truetwit – but there really isn’t.  It doesn’t stop you being spammed, only your intelligence and discretion can stop that.

So, to save me having to send tweets to all you Truetwit users, take note:  Follow me if you wish, but I will not take a badly designed eye-test to follow you back.   If you really want to use some form of filter, at least make it human – such as this from @ProfDimond that I received yesterday:

“Thanks for following me :) If I haven’t followed you back, just send me an @-reply to say hi… it helps weed out the spammers & bots.”

Hallelujah!

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May 17

Rebirth of a community newspaper

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Social Media, Surrey, Woking

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In my last blog post I talked about the challenge of building a community of engaged users who would contribute to and support the relaunch of the Woking News and Mail. Called in to help with the relaunch, I had just under 5 weeks to get a buzz going on Twitter and Facebook, build a following and get them to contribute articles for the paper. Launch date was set in stone – Thursday May 12th.

So how did it go?

When I got involved on 10th April there was a twitter account (@WokingNewsmail) with 52 followers and a Facebook Fan Page with just 4 Likes.

Using Twellow and Twittergrader to find the top local tweeps, and with copious use of Advanced Twitter Search we arrived at 1,000 Twitter followers the day before the paper hit the streets – and by Saturday 14th May we were on 1,111 Twitter followers and 156 Facebook Likes.

More importantly, we were inundated with news articles, photos and features and the paper was greeted with enthusiasm by the people of Woking who had been deprived of their community newspaper for 2 months. Feedback on both platforms was unanimously good – except for those who complained that they couldn’t get a copy of the paper because demand was so high that it sold out.

Having got the ship safely down the slipway and cracked a metaphorical bottle of champagne, my Social Media work with the paper is now over, and the editorial team will be picking up the reins and making sure that the readers, advertisers and contributors all continue to feel fully engaged. For myself, I’ll be writing my column on Social Media – named T’witter by my wife – and wishing the paper every success as it moves forward and changes from a monthly to a fortnightly and eventually a weekly fixture in the newsagents of Woking.

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Apr 12

Phoenix from the ashes?

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Social Media, Surrey, Woking

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Can Social Media help turn a struggling local newspaper into a shining community success?

The conventional wisdom about Social Media is that it is a slow process and takes a long time to build an engaged audience with whom you can have meaningful interactions; you can’t just buy followers “off the shelf”, whatever some of the more fanciful tweets you see on Twitter every day might claim. The prospect of trying to build a community from scratch which will itself contribute hugely to the content of a newspaper in less than five weeks is, you might think, ludicrous. And yet……

The Woking News and Mail was founded in 1894 and, like so many of its peers, went through a number of ownership changes over the years before coming to rest with the Guardian Media Group who decided a few weeks ago that it was no longer viable, closing it down in March 2011.

There had been an eleventh hour campaign among readers to try to save the paper, but to no avail.

One small group of people, however, were determined not to let the paper die and the title was bought from the Guardian Media Group. Under the leadership of Managing Director Jon Davies, Editor Hilary Gavin and Head of Publishing Bruce Hazelton, a Social Media campaign has been launched on Twitter and Facebook with the aim of encouraging the would-be citizen journalists of Woking to contribute stories to the new News and Mail. The first edition of the revitalised paper will hit the streets on May 12th this year – with only a minor break in circulation since the death of the old News and Mail.

Can the News and Mail be the exception to the rule of slowly gathering a community of followers? Can Woking support its own local version of the Huffington Post?

Please get involved with the action – leave comments below, follow us on Twitter or come along and Like our Facebook Page

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Mar 20

New Town Square

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Social Media

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A guest post from Jim Massey:

New Town Square

I made a comment on one of Martyn’s earlier Blogs about Social Media becoming the new “Town Square”  and he has given me this opportunity to explain a bit more about what led me to feel this way, the implications for Martyn’s clients, and more importantly for those of you who aren’t yet!

I’m a great fan of Naomi Klein‘s books, one of the themes that she has developed from “No Logo” through “Shock Doctrine” is the privatisation of public spaces, where instead of having open or common places to meet, we now have shopping malls and coffee shops which are branded and controlled. These do not offer places to meet, socialise, discuss freely or become engaged in social and volunteer activity. (try putting up posters or having a meeting in a Shopping Mall without prior permission and vetting of the cause). I also think in the UK that local government spending cuts are reducing the availability and standard of community centres and a predominantly secular society has moved away from a lot of faith based activities.

Membership of local groups and associations is declining, from the Boy Scouts to Golf clubs, (though there is an increase in centrally organised bodies, where you can log in and register for a cause rather than physically join. e.g. I give donations to MSF rather than get actively involved locally). This decline in social cohesion and group activity has been going on for many years and has been blamed on television, computer games, home computing/internet etc. I even found a reference back to the beginning of the 19th century where people were concerned that the mass availability of printed novels meant the youth of that period were too busy staying inside reading books rather than going out and getting involved in things like defeating Napoleon!

So what does this all mean? Social cohesion is just as common place today as it has been in the past, it is just changing its nature as technology has enabled us to interact and do business in different ways, railways, penny post, telegraphs, telephones, radio, television, internet and now social media. The game has changed, social media has become where we meet, where we exchange ideas, where we discuss things, where we bind as communities, where we do business…. its bigger than just “word of mouth”.

So if you are not there, in the new town square, involved in these communities then you are missing out completely; if you are there but don’t fit in, you could be actively damaging your image, which is worse; and if you are new in town and don’t have a friendly guide to help you, you could get lost very easily.

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Mar 04

KLM Surprise

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Guildford, Social Media

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Continuing the theme of my last few blogs, here’s a great example of a company that’s using social media to delight their customers.

I was having lunch with one of Guildford’s top social media and NLP people, Nicky Kriel, yesterday and she mentioned this video of how KLM came up with an innovative use of social media. That’s right, KLM – not a high-tech startup but the world’s oldest airline still in operation. With forward-thinking like this, they’re likely to be around for an awful long time to come.

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Mar 03

Is Anybody Listening?

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Social Media

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Is Anybody ListeningMy previous blog talked about companies who use social media to engage with their customers and those who don’t. Even though I was already well aware that some companies are not listening, I was surprised to read the results of a survey by the Sage UK Omnibus reported in this article in the CustomerExperience online magazine.

Astonishingly, while 83% of business owners think that the economic conditions have made delivering a good customer experience more important, only 1% believed that engaging with customers on social media by responding to comments or criticisms is a key part to delivering this..

It goes on More than 53% of consumers have decided against making a purchase based on an online recommendation and half indicated that online reviews and ratings influenced their buying decisions more than any other form of online advertising .

So half of customers have decided against a purchase based on adverse comments in social media about products, yet 99% of companies don’t think that it’s crucial to engage with those criticisms? Something just doesn’t add up.

Is there just so much demand in the economy that companies don’t need to think about satisfying their existing customers? If so, that’s something that seems to have escaped the notice of the economic pundits.

Maybe there’s a lack of knowledge of social media amongst business people in the SME space, maybe there is scepticism or even cynicism about too many social media “gurus” promising the earth and failing to deliver. Whatever the reason, those companies who don’t start to engage with their customers right now will see their competition pull ahead, and it’s going to be that much harder for them to make up that ground later. Once you have a reputation for ignoring your customers it may well be nigh impossible, and will certainly be very expensive, to try to overturn that market perception.

If you manage a small and medium business and are not already taking the first steps to start meaningful conversations with your customers on the various social media platforms, call me on 07825 739164 for an informal chat. What have you got to lose?

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Mar 01

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Social Media

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In my last blog here I talked about how some companies “get” Social Media and embrace the democratisation of power to their customers, and how others don’t.

I’d like to give some examples of these different types of company, and to make the comparisons stark I will choose three different companies from the same sector; mobile phone network providers.

The Good

Last week I was in the audience at Digital Surrey where Heather Taylor (@HeatherATaylor) of giffgaff (www.giffgaff.com) entertained us with the story of the growth of the giffgaff network; a completely new type of company conceived initially as a community. The network, which sprang from the giant O2, provides a SIM only service and everything they do springs from the suggestions and requests of the members of their community; their subscribers (and here I think that we can legitimately use the Facebook term “fans”) suggest developments that they’d like to see, come up with new types of service packages, actively participate in online forums and offer customer service to other subscribers. This is not an altruistic, tree-hugging type of community – giffgaff reward their most active fans with incentives and discounts. In return, the subscribers get a service which feels as though it is tailored exactly to their needs and they “sell” the network to their own friends. Rather than being a company that has added Social Media to their marketing strategy, giffgaff is a company that was founded on the use of Social Media to drive their business.

The Bad

In complete contrast, there is 3Mobile – one of the largest networks in the UK but one that completely ignores its users. I will not list their problems here because they change on a daily basis, but whenever I am showing people examples of how Social Media should not be used I just direct them to a Twitter search on the hashtag #3mobile. It is almost beyond belief that any self-respecting company could have so many angry consumers trashing their brand in public yet never respond to their complaints. Try it today – just look up #3mobile and be amazed. One word of caution; the language that their users deploy to describe how they feel about their network provider would not be allowed on TV before the watershed. Why do 3Mobile never respond? One of life’s eternal mysteries.

The Ugly

My final example in this trio is Vodafone. As was widely reported, Vodafone had a major network outage yesterday after a break-in at their Basingstoke centre – I was one of those with no mobile network coverage for much of the day. They were caught on the hop, and really struggled to get any information out to their users to explain what was going on and when service would be resumed – this report is typical: PCMag. Again, customers took to Social Media platforms to express their annoyance. Vodafone were certainly slow to respond, but in contrast to 3Mobile they did make some efforts and by the end of the day there were even some positive tweets about their response. Could they have handled it better? Absolutely. Will they learn for the future? Time will tell.

The moral of the story is that Social Media must not be an afterthought. Build it into the way you interact with your customers, and your reputation will grow. Leave it to chance, and your reputation is in the hands of others. Remember the Jeff Bezos quote from my last blog:

“A brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”

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