Posts Tagged ‘conversation’
Are you the social media knowledge gatekeeper?
March 25th, 2010
We all know every PR agency has a social media section, or at least mention, on its website, even if that only relates to the Twitter account, but to what level are PRs really utilising social media?
I recently came across Michelle Hinson and Don Wright’s paper on ‘The use of social media among PR professionals‘ via K D Paine’s blog, and found some interesting stats in among the results on this very subject. The survey was based on responses from 560 PRs from around the globe, although I suspect the majority were US-based, including members of IPRA, PRSA, IPR, etc.
Some of the highlights that particularly caught the eye were:
• PR practitioners feel that social media’s influence on public relations is growing. In 2007, just over half said that they believed that social media had changed the way their organisations or their client organisations communicate. In 2010 that figure had climbed to 83%, and 96% said they spent part of their average workday working with social media.
• In 2008 just 66 % of respondents said that social media has enhanced the practice of PR. By 2010, the figure had increased to 81%.
• 84% of 2010 respondents encourage research to measure social media impact, but only about a third is actually doing it.
• In 2009, respondents saw search engine marketing as the most important element of social media. This year Facebook and Twitter were seen as most important.
• 64% are using Twitter regularly, which is double to figure in 2009, and 73% said that they regularly used Social networking sites to catch up on news.
The figures are encouraging, and at least show PRs are taking social media seriously, which was a big part of the battle a few years ago. However, in my experience, this doesn’t paint a true picture of the average PR consultant, but more likely the ‘social media knowledge gatekeeper’.
As mentioned at the beginning, most PR agencies refer to social media in some way, through their pitches and in their collateral, many experiment with social media to one degree or other, and some even have ‘experts’ that can be called in to talk the talk in pitches or raise the social media profile of the agency.
Social media knowledge in PR agencies spans a wide knowledge spectrum, from those that are challenging the non-PR agencies (social media, digital, search, conversation agencies) with social media campaigns, through to the traditional PR agencies that, well, are very far away from that.
I put it to the Jury that in most cases, even in some of the agencies that have a good reputation for social media, the knowledge is held by one or possibly two people, and in private conversations they too admit it is difficult to truly get the agency immersed in the conversation online, and how that relates to the conversation offline.
This is the next challenge for PR as a whole, instead of falling into the traditional approach of having technology teams, consumer teams, and following suit by having social media teams, but truly understanding that any PR campaign needs to include social strategies, not separate from the main campaign, but as part of the whole campaign. Until PR campaigns actually span the online and offline worlds, building conversation together, the PR industry can’t say that it is up to speed on social media.
However, that’s not to say this is just an issue with PR agencies, don’t think the same set of circumstances doesn’t relate to digital, advertising and marketing agencies etc, I’m just using PR as a relevant example of knowledge gatekeepers, but I’m confident the same issues apply elsewhere .
Twitter stats don’t tell the whole story
March 11th, 2010
As you might have seen, an interesting Twitter stat has been doing the rounds recently: ‘21% of Twitter users are active users’ ,a stat that you’re likely to see regularly from now on.
This originated from the Barracuda Labs 2009 Annual Report, which was released earlier this week, revealing data from Twitter trends and tracking, as well as Web threats and trends, and email spam and viruses. The report is also available at the company’s portal.
The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts, and started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times.
Looking back, the data shows interesting usage trends and reveals that 26% of Twitter users had 10 followers or more by December 2009, while only 40% were following 10 people or more, in fact 51% of users were following less than five people.
The report also confirms that 34% of Twitter users hadn’t tweeted once, while 73% had tweeted less than 10 times. That means nearly all of the tweets on the social network were coming from about 1/4 of the user base, and it is these users that the report refers to as ‘power users’.
So, are these revealing stats going to spell the end of the myth that Twitter is going to be the new communications platform for all? Hopefully, because i doubt even the quarter of Twitter users that are using it consistently thought it was going ever to be that.
If you’re not trying to make money out of Twitter, the importance attached to the amount or frequency of Twitter’s usage should not be as important as one might first assume.
The most important element of Twitter is the conversation, not the brand, not the technology and not the potential, but the conversation. That conversation doesn’t just happen on Twitter, it happens across many social networks, messaging platforms, via SMS, even in email and person-to-person, and Twitter allows part of that conversation, bringing communities together that choose to share information with each other.
If Twitter stopped tomorrow, the conversation would still continue, and my bet is the majority of Twitter’s ‘power user’ base, that Tweet the majority of the conversation, use other platforms to continue the conversation in other ways.
So is this the end of Twitter and the Twitter success story? No, Twitter is a massive success story, but it has been blown out of proportion in some ways. It is, as the research says, a valuable tool for ‘power users’, but in the world of social media we all have freedom of choice, we all communicate in different ways and some of us will find our preferred community on Twitter while others will look elsewhere for a better fit in terms of relevance. However, the one common theme is the conversation, and the ability to share; knowledge, content, news, excitement, sorrow, whatever.
We’ve seen the ‘no-one reads blogs’ headlines before, which again i don’t believe to be the case. Of the millions of blogs only a small percentage are useful and interesting, and those blogs are well utilised, the others quite simply are not. Does that make blogs any less useful though?
What we are seeing is Twitter maturing, as the study says, Twitter recently reported it had reached approximately 50 million tweets per day.
In the beginning of 2008, Twitter was growing approximately 0.31% per month. By November 2008, that growth increased to 1.95% per month.
After December 2008, Twitter’s growth exploded from nearly 2% per month, rising to approximately 4% per month, before finally peaking at nearly 20% per month in April 2009. Growth appears to have normalised, dropping back to 0.34% in December 2009.
We can also see more evidence of Twitter users finding their feet. A full 79% of users had less than ten tweets in June 2009, but that number dropped to 73% by December. 80% of users had less than 10 followers in June 2009, but that percentage dropped to 74% by December.
So, little by little, Twitter is finding its place in the role of conversation. It’s not going to change the way we communicate radically, but it is helping us to communicate more effectively, with those in our chosen community.
August 8th, 2008
As a PR company we always have our ear to the ground, and Twitter is a place were negitivity can be spawned so quickly that it’s crucial you’re monitoring conversations about you and your company.
Here are some tools that might help.
Monitter is very new on the scene - it’s a Twitter monitor that lets you “monitor” the Twitter world for a set of three keywords and watch what people are saying.
Looks nice, although it’s a shame it only lets you track 3 keywords. It also allows you to take an RSS feed for the keyword.
TweetDeck aims to make all your Twitter experience as accessible as possible.
You can put your followers into groups, and save keyword searches. The drawback to Tweetdeck is that the timeframe is only 48 hrs, so aything after that can not be accessed. I still do think that TweetDeck is a break through act and is still in Beta so expect more to come.
Twist is a very nice embeddable graph, where you can input several keywords. You can create a chart of keywords from the last week or last month. A nice way of visually monitoring keywords on Twitter.
Twittermeter is similar to the above but without the embedding option.
Tweetstats is a way to monitor people by their Twitter username. It gives you some really nice graphs of your timeline, hourly tweets, a tag cloud and some other nice graphs. Great little site to monitor useage.
If you want to monitor the latest Twitter trends Twitterscoop is a good place to start. The landing page offers you a tag cloud and a hot topics section, and you can also search for your own topics.
Twitturly gives you a real time list of the url’s people are talking about.
Hopefully these will get you started - if you have any amazing tools to offer please let me know.
Tweet about them and they will join Twitter
July 3rd, 2008
I had a new social media experience today. Yesterday I Tweeted about a new start-up called Hive Sight, and the next minute I see that they have joined Twitter. It could just be a coincidence and part of their online strategy already…but maybe I helped to speed things up a little!
Here is the series of events:
I tweeted about Hive Sight at 8.47 am on July 2nd.
12.39 pm that very day I am being followed by Co-founder @ HiveSight. I am also asked a question about my experiences of the site via Twitter.
It seems as though they have just created a new Twitter account.
It looks like Hive Sight have been monitoring online conversation and wanted to respond immediately and personally to my Tweet - absolutely the right thing to do!
More companies should take this swift approach of engaging in open conversation and actively monitoring online dialogue. If you don’t engage in online conversation, your company might find itself fighting fires that could have been nipped in the bud!