Posts Tagged ‘Social networking’
Did Facebook and Twitter influence the General Election?
May 7th, 2010
As I took up my blunt pencil attached to a piece of string in the polling booth yesterday, and made a cross against my chosen candidate, it struck me how much Twitter and Facebook have enhanced my interest and understanding around this General Election, but similarly how far the UK still has to go before we can experience a truly, socially-connected election.
This was the first General Election where Twitter and Facebook played a part. They gave the electorate a new ‘voice’ aside from their vote, enabling them to freely discuss election issues in an uncensored environment within a much wider network of individuals.
Facebook set-up a live voter counter on its website (via a tie-up with the Electoral Commission) - according to the final tally, 107,892 Facebook users voted. A poll was also conducted through this group, aka the Facebook election, which saw Nick Clegg and the LibDems emerge victorious. Facebook groups and political pages have been hugely active - today a particularly active one seems to be ‘I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who want Proportional Representation - UK‘.
But how much of this social network activity and buzz was two-way conversation and engagement?
A comment on the BBC blog is telling:
“I asked questions via Twitter of the main parties, but no reply was ever returned. In fact, the only politician who replied was John Prescott. The political parties were treating Twitter just like another letterbox through which to poke leaflets - but failing to grasps the idea that such systems require two-way communication to be effective. I just felt ignored by them online.”
Today across Twitter in particular, and to a lesser degree Facebook, there seems to be a general feeling that today’s election results do not match with their political learnings and discussions over the past few weeks. BBC blogger, Rory Cellan-Jones, makes the same conclusion in his blog post: So was it an Internet Election?. He opens the post saying: “The verdict was already in, even before polling day. This was not an internet election, and all those who had suggested it might be had got it completely wrong. It was a television election, and all of those tweeters and bloggers were sad political obsessives talking to each other.”
Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly provided a gateway to political engagement, and importantly among the younger generation. A YouGov survey found that a quarter of 18-24-year-olds had commented on politics via social networks. But at the end of the day, this activity seems to have had little impact on the final election outcome.
What’s this Facebook status message craze about?
February 5th, 2010
Last month I blogged about why women on Facebook were changing their status messages to a colour, which as you now know, was related to a guerilla campaign promoting Breast Cancer Awareness.
Since then, the Facebook status message craze has reached epidemic proportions.
If you’ve missed them, we’ve had:
- My fine is…. - a Facebook group that encouraged users to calculate a fine for their misspent youth (i.e. smoked weed £10), and enter the result in their status message. The group is less than a month old and already has 440,837 members, attracting an astonishing 79,181 members on the first day of opening.
- Celebrity doppelganger week (or month – it seems to have taken on a life of its own) - encourages Facebook users to change their profile picture to that of a celebrity who they’ve been told they look like.
- Urbandictionary.com - Facebook users have been changing their status message to the Urbandictionary.com definition of their name. Mine by the way is “intellectually attractive woman” which I completely agree with! The Urbandictionary.com Facebook group has almost 14,000 members.
Well at least those are the crazes that I’ve picked up on!
So what’s the point? There was a clear agenda to the Breast Cancer Awareness campaign, but not so for the others. So why are they are attracting thousands upon thousands of fans?
The answer, I believe, is a tribal one. As users’ lives become increasingly ingrained in social networks such as Facebook, they feel the need to align themselves with certain tribes. All of the above examples enable an individual to tell more about their personal narrative, be it how naughty they were in their teens, or who people have told them they look like. By participating in these status message crazes, they are managing their online tribal identity.
If this line of thinking interests you, it might be worth checking out the blog of Michael Bayler (who is a client), who has written a lot about consumer identity and the new tribalism.
I’m sure brands will be trying to cash in quick on the Facebook status message craze…so expect more of them…but I don’t suspect the trend will last if every brand jumps on the bandwaggon.
Why are women changing their Facebook status to a colour?
January 8th, 2010
If you’re a Facebook user, you may have noticed that women have been changing their Facebook status to a colour over the past day or so. Mine currently reads as ‘black’. It’s been driving men mad, including my husband! So what is it all about?
Well I hope I won’t get shot down for revealing that the colour corresponds to the bra that we’re wearing. It’s all in aid of Breast Cancer Awareness, and has been a beautiful demonstration of how the most simple social media marketing idea can reach epidemic proportions within a matter of hours.
Last night I received the following Facebook message from a female friend of mine:
“Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men …. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha!”
The tone of the message was perfectly executed - it had the desired affect of making me giggle, change my status message, and pass onto my female friends as instructed. I’m not the sort of person to usually participate in chain messages and so this demonstrates how important language remains in social media PR communications. Within minutes of forwarding the message I could see friends of mine getting excited and updating their status messages - I received a number of texts from recipients expressing their enthusiasm for the idea. If it’s possible to sense a ‘buzz’ across Facebook, there was definitely one last night among female users. This morning when I logged into my Facebook Newsfeed, I was greeted with a long list of colour themed status messages.
The Breast Cancer Awareness raising exercise was free and quick to implement, but has been highly effective in terms of reminding people about the cause. It just goes to show that social media PR doesn’t have to be about big budgets, but just a neat idea.
Buying friends isn’t social, it’s antisocial
September 4th, 2009
There has been much discussion around an article featured in AdAge earlier this week, which profiles some of the services offered by a company called uSocial, which is an odd name for a company that appears to offer a service that is in fact antisocial (anti social media that is).
As AdAge put it, ‘Pay them (uSocial) money and they’ll make you at least appear to be very big on Facebook. In fact, they’ll deliver you 5,000 Facebook “friends” for 7.6 cents per friend ($654.30), or up to 10,000 Facebook “fans” for a mere 8.5 cents a fan ($1,167.30).’
The article continues: ‘USocial has been in the Twitter-follower game for a while but is adding Facebook friends and fans to its offering today, per a press release declaring the adage “You can’t buy your friends” to be incorrect, at least when it comes to Facebook. It claims that since each Facebook friend or fan is worth $1 per month, buyers will make back their investment many times over in the first month (it’s unclear how it came up with that number).’
uSocial also sell you votes on Digg, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon and Propeller.
On the face of it, I can see why a company, brand, individual might think - more followers, equals more potential business, which equals more money - right? Wrong!
As anyone, with even the smallest understanding of social media, will tell you, at the heart of social media is a number of basic elements such as listening, conversation, openness, community, reputation, trust…I could go on. So how does buying followers, friends or votes help?
Oh hang on, so the more votes, friends, followers you have the more important your business seems, the more traffic to your site and the more opportunity to buy your product/service, right? Wrong!
If I pay 50 people to go to a shop, let’s say the shop sells babies clothes, and they all turn up and make the shop look busy, how many people are going to stay in the shop for more than five seconds? Or listen to what the shop keeper has to say? Or tell their friends about the shop? Let alone buy anything? Not many because we didn’t check to see if those 50 people were relevant or even interested in buying clothes for babies. They’ve been paid to go there and they have zero interest in anything other than fulfilling that limited contract.
Ah but what about the people passing the shop, who see it’s busy and go in to see what the fuss is all about? Well, as soon as they find out there is nothing relevant and the people in the shop aren’t even interested, guess what, they’re off too!
So, I have purchased my 5,000 friends on Facebook, what do I do with them now? They have no interest in what I’m saying, no desire to engage in conversation, and will they even stay there?
But hang on, perhaps I’ve been too hasty, a look at the uSocial website tells me: ‘How we get you friends is simply by finding out exactly what industry, niche, or target market you are wanting to find people to target and then we go about attaining relevent friends for you and adding them to your Faceboook account. Every single person we gain for you will be real users and exactly relevant to what you are looking for — this is our guarantee.’ (BTW: the text is taken directly from the site, so forgive the typos)
There, doesn’t seem to be any confirmation of how they go about ‘attaining’ these relevant friends, and i fear the paid element may in fact tell us all we need to know, in which case I refer you to my example above.
This, in my personal opinion, is another example of old media rules being applied to a social media world. E.g. If I stick an advert in a newspaper with a readership of one million, I’ll get a massive return, easy! Advert placed, sit down and wait for phone to ring…you’ll be waiting a long time.
I’m afraid the bad news is there’s no quick win in a social media environment, and while this service may, and I stress may, get people to your website, I doubt they are interested in what you have to say, and on that point I agree completely with Chris Norton’s point in his post on the subject where he said: ‘Social media is about relationships and people need to remember that.’
Exactly.
Twitter: part of the conversation
August 21st, 2009
In terms of brand communications, Twitter has been the hot topic for longer than we all care to remember. The doubters and supporters both offer good arguments, but what’s the truth about Twitter and why should you care?
In the last few months we’ve seen headlines such as: ‘Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content’, from a Harvard study of 300,000 users, and more recently, social media revolution is going nowhere from the Telegraph and 40% of tweets are “pointless babble”, which came from Pear Analytics who captured 2,000 tweets over the course of two weeks and catagorised them.
Interestingly, the rest of the stats from the Pear analysis were a little more revealing: 37.5% of tweets were conversational and 8.7% had pass-along value, 5.85% were self promotion and 3.75% was spam.
So, very nearly the same amount of tweets that grabbed the headline were in fact conversational, and here is the point Ladies and Gentleman; Twitter is all about the conversation. Conversation between individuals, groups, networks, brands, whoever. Twitter is a conversation engine.
So why the doubters? The point that many are missing is that Twitter is not the answer to every communications issue. It’s not going to change the world, and it will eventually be replaced by new social platforms, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable now.
Furthermore, not all Twitter users will be relevant to you, your brand, your conversation, just as not every person at an event is relevant to you, your brand or your conversation. Some people use Twitter for fun, some use it to stay in touch with their network, and some use it as a sales tool, but at Twitter’s core is a group of highly motivated, well-networked, socially-astute communicators that use Twitter to listen, discuss, converse and yes sometimes self-promote and babble as well.
The problem for many doubters seems to be that they simply don’t get it, and drop out pretty much straight away. Nielsen reported that Twitter was hemorrhaging users in April as 60 percent of new users leave the service within a month.
Many of these people seem to dip in, expect everything and receive nothing. That’s because as with any form of conversation, you have to work at Twitter to get a return. You have to identify your community, listen, add value to the conversation and build your reputation to succeed. Not everybody is willing to put that time in.
When the time is put in, the rewards include open conversation with your communities, direct access to authorities that you would never have been able to reach previously, learning, news, opportunities, sharing ideas and much more than I have the room to list here.
Yes, you may also find out when somebody missed a train, or lost their phone, but isn’t that all part of the conversation?
The Hoff sees the value of social networking
August 18th, 2008
The Hoff might the brunt of many jokes but he obviously takes his social media very seriously -
His Myspace profile says,
Hi Guys! I have started my own social network and website. HoffSpace, located at www.davidhasselhoff.com. This is my new and official home. I won’t be interacting much more on MySpace, so come on over and join the fun on HoffSpace. It’s fun and safe. Peace,
David
To check out his new offing Hoffspace click here.
The site itself seemed a bit bland to me, and I would have liked to see more associated colours, e.g. the red and yellow of Baywatch and of course the black of Knight Rider!
Another thing that struck me was the level of links going to the Hoffs product range of posters and gifts - hence the VALUE in my title.
Check out this official poster, he looks like a reincarnation of the joker.
Along with the Andy Murry on Twitter story it seems like celebrities and are starting to realise how powerful social media techniques and tools can be. Hopefully marketing managers will catch on too!
First foray into social media is dead
August 5th, 2008
I shed a little tear yesterday for my first truly online social experience which has sadly passed away. The site in question is Social FM or Mercora as I new it back in 2005. This was probably one of the first applications/networking sites that got me interested in the social media space.
Mecora was founded in 2003 and Re-branded to compete with the likes of online music giants Last FM, it was a free music network that allows users to listen to a digital radio network of over three million songs with in personalised profile pages.
Read more about the close down here:
Thanks for the memory’s Mercora, I leave you with this!
Celebrities crash the social networking scene!
June 19th, 2008
We all know about celebrity product endorsements and celebrity’s never ending love of free goody bags from the latest parties or film premiers. So celebrity involvement in social media activity seems like a match made in heaven. Social media is mostly free, and they get to endorse a product, usually a social network!
Nick Lachey’s of newly-weds fame was the first well-publicised social network offering, followed by a whole host of others.
Mashable has a great post on celebrity endorsed social networks.
Here are some others that weren’t mentioned in that list.
WeMix fronted by Ludacris, the U.S. rapper, who has his own ‘Luda’s blog’. One feature that I haven’t seen before is the ability to send a voicemail that can be played back on the site.
Here’s what Luda has to say about WeMix:
Another is WuChess, this is how they describe it: ” WuChess.com is the world’s first online chess and Hip-Hop community. You can create and share profiles with your friends and triumph over enemies on the 64 squares. Not just against people in your neighbourhood but from all over the world.”
From a PR perspective it makes things a whole lot more attractive when you have a celebrity attached to the brand! From a social media point of view the celebrity/social media partnership sounds like the start of a trend. Watch this space for an influx of celebrity endorsed social media products…
Strange and Weird Social Networking Sites
May 15th, 2008
We’ve all heard about the Facebooks and MySpaces of the social networking world, but what about some of the more weird and wonderful ones out there.
Here’s a list of a few of the weirder social networks that we have come across:
Weird Beard A place for personal growth. - All about beards!
BarberandBeauty “We created this network to express our love for the barber and beauty profession. So if you have or see a new hair cut, please upload it on our network. We also like unique nail jobs.” - So if you’re bold or you bite your nails this one is probably not for you!
Vampirefreaks.com “Vampire Freaks - industrial music and gothic culture. - The featured cult section looks tempting!
Spot a Potty - you guessed it, spot a potty/toilet and send in the photo!
Loving A Convict It Takes Patience!!! You can get the support you need from here!! - This one is very niche!
Raw Island “Where raw fooder’s meet, share & communicate. Raw food lovers are a far flung group geographically. But when we gather at a seminar or festival it seems like we’ve known each other our whole lives. Help us recreate that spirit here.” - Yummy!
Cleaning Buddies Unite Sometimes I need a little motivation to keep going when I have a million things to do. So we can check in with each other and give tips and words of encouragement. We can even give before and after pics to show our progress and how hard we worked. - I bet thoses pictures are really interesting!
Prisoners Left Behind Prisoners Left Behind is a prison advocate social networking site. We give accounts from people behind bars on their daily living conditions.
Spndxboi Fun! Say hello sometime if you’re into lycra/spandex… - Enough said!
The Dark Underworld Beyond Death you can say whatever you like and do whatever you like here with NO RULES - My kinda place!
Cave Dances “We dance in a cave ! ~ Dances of Universal Peace retreats have been happening since 1999 at Split Top Cave in Canyonlands, Utah. A very special way to connect with Nature, Silence, the Beloved and Community all at the same time.” - Don’t really fancy it, do you!
If anything has caught your eye here, it’s probably best to keep it to yourself !
Still don’t understand Twitter? Watch this!
March 7th, 2008
Great short video from the guys at Common Craft explaining what Twitter is.
Also of note on the Common Craft website are similar short videos on RSS in plain English, Social Bookmarking in plain English, Wikis in plain English and Social Networking in plain English. These few short video will effectively show our clients some of post important social media platforms, so thanks Common Craft!