Comments on: Social Media Basics: I need YOU

By: Intro to Social Media

Intro to Social Media — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:52:18 +0000

[...] Media for some lovely people. It’s just an introduction but since the web helped me (both here and here ) I thought I should upload some highlights. I’m not uploading the full thing cause I [...]

By: alefbetac

alefbetac — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:58:52 +0000

To add my 2 bits… I think in social media there are no formulas. Sure, you can do basic things like create a branded facebook page and twitter updates (where relevant), but it all depends on the product/company you're trying to promote and the nature of its products. In terms of communication I think the difference with communication in the traditional (top-down) sense is that brands and companies in social media need to learn how to communicate in a different tone and they need to know how to listen and respond accordingly. An analogy that comes to my mind in terms of communication is that companies should adopt a behavior one would expect from a mature adult. That means when mistakes happen, apologies are in order and honesty and transparency are paramount. In this way people learn to trust the brand/company and listen to what you have to say when you need to say something important. As for the impact of social media on the internal organization of a company I was reading an interesting article in the WSJ which I think sums it up well: http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/03/24/the-fa...

Enjoy.

By: sofiagk

sofiagk — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:16:40 +0000

Hey Myrto this looks really interesting – thanks for bringing it to my attention.

By: Myrto Lazopoulou

Myrto Lazopoulou — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:54:51 +0000

I've just realised that the link to the pdf is broken so here it is http://bit.ly/hGzhS

By: Myrto Lazopoulou

Myrto Lazopoulou — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:40:58 +0000

Dear Sofia,

First of all I fully agree with all the comments above. I only want to add that

I wouldn't confuse them with technical things, platforms etc.

I would focus/emphasise the following things:

How these tools increase transparency within an organisation, improve collaboration, enchance communication and finally how easy is to publish something.

I always use the example with the org chart. Within a large organisation an org chart constantly changes and you always had to find/chase the person responsible for that page in order to update it.
By empowering the user to do that everything becomes a lot easier….

You might find this case study helpful – although it is based on a wiki – I strongly believe that it can be applied to all the social tools.

http://bit.ly/6qh5G

Best of luck with your presentation

Myrto

By: sofiagk

sofiagk — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:26:44 +0000

Hey Nikos – yes you are right. This is for Communications people

By: Nikos Drandakis

Nikos Drandakis — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:08:42 +0000

Hey Sofia, sorry for being so late to the party – I have some strange days…

I'm afraid that a talk about the various tools (facebook, twitter, etc) misses the whole point, but on the other hand, I'm not sure your potential audience wants to see the point – instead I'm sure they're able to buy hype.

All in all, I have to agree with iliask about Tim O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0, which consists of "users add/create value". I always like to engage my audience in a conversation about how their users/clients/markets could create value for their products/services.

For different industries it could be a different answer. Value from users could come for different areas of corporate funcions such as: research and development, production, distribution, customer support, promotion and edvertising, etc.

I would investigate these sections to find ways to engage my customers and let them help me build better products, make their life easier.

Apart from that, I'm afraid that you're looking for an answer focused on the Marketing – Communications departments. Is this so?

By: nickthecreek

nickthecreek — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:41:23 +0000

Sofia,
Probably another aspect; the signal to noise ratio which in the social media environment is imho quite at the same levels compared to the era where Usenet was a main 'venue' characterizing online behavior. I think that both in 1993 and in 2009 the same issue persists: The discovery/implementation/use of a filtering process that will help eliminate (or get it to a near zero value) the noise and strengthen the signal (the useful bit of info, whatever this is depending on the usrs' expectation). Nowadays it's probable harder to do this, apps and platforms like blogs, twitter, facebook, linkedin etc do communicate via APIs but they are incompatible to each other, they follow different principles, processes, licensing schemes, so it's far too harder to get the "juice" out of them. Just my 2 cents..

By: sofiagk

sofiagk — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:00:48 +0000

I think you have to understand how the average comms person thinks. We are trained to think return on investment/ time – we are trained to count minutes and exhibit results somehow (i'm not saying I agree with with) – Hence taking them away from one type of thinking (eg. "All these people on Twitter – don't they have a job to do") to another type (eg. "Being on Twitter is an integral part of my job") needs a lot of explaining. You can't make people do stuff. I think it's just a case of explaining the pros and cons and then letting people choose.

By: nikan

nikan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:12:04 +0000

Sofia, the idea of crowdsourcing a presentation is great. Actually, I think we should all do it to a certain extent.
My pick:
a. Talk about social technographics, to make clear the different kinds of engagement in social media.
b. After that make a quick social technographics poll to see what kind of people you have n your audience.
c. Based on b. talk about the 2-3 most prevalent profiles more and mention the media that fit to them most. If they are joiners, talk facebook and linkedin etc
d. Go from case to rule: show from a specific case what looks like a 'law'. Working the other way around is boring.