FreshNetworks Blog

SXSW image by benjamin ellis

This week I’m going to be reporting from the South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin Texas. SXSW is World’s largest digital and interactive festival/trade-show/conference/party/event/get-together. Around 20,000 people will be joining me in Austin to uncover the latest thinking in digital and, I suspect,  to network like nutters.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to make it to SXSW for years. A few months ago my prayers were answered and FreshNetworks was picked by UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) to be one of 40 companies chosen to represent the UK at the festival. The grandly titled Digital Mission aims to help UK digital companies expand internationally and develop overseas business relationships.

The list of events is monsterous. It’s taken me a few hours to get my itinerary in order. I suspect I have fallen into classic SXSW-newbie mistake of trying to plan out a perfect route between each session to ensure a schedule that optimises my time here. I’ll probably find the plan goes in the bin half-way through day1 one.

Some frantic session planning on the plane

Here are just three of the sessions I am looking forward to:

• Time + Social + Location. What’s next in mobile experiences – Foursquare and Gowalla are hot properties inn the social media world at the moment. This session includes Naveen from Foursquare.
• Can the Real Time Web be Realised – a panel debate featuring some great speakers – Scott Raymond, co-founder of Gowalla, Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Bret Slatkin from Google who created PubSubHubBub which you will hear a lot about in 2010.
• Banking 2.0 – financial services driven by people and emerging technologies – as a social media agency, FreshNetworks has always done a lot in the financial services sector, so I am keen to test some ideas we’ve been discussing back at base.

And finally, one of the delights of coming to SXSW as part of the Digital Mission is the opportunity to spend lots of time with other UK entrepreneurs. I have always found that spending time with peers not only gives me new ideas, but also (because I’m rather competitive) it tends to raise the level of my personal ambition.

There are a few companies that I am especially interested in learning more about:

• oneDrum – embedding collaboration in Microsoft Office documents
• Silence Media – cost per engagement ad network for video banner ads
• Slicethepie – crowdsourced band/music funding

Let me know if you want me to bring you anything back from Texas.

Read all our posts from SXSW

So the first FreshNetworks breakfast briefing has just finished and we had some great insights into how not for profit organisations (NFP’s) can use social media for strengthening their membership offering.

Breast Cancer Care Case Study

First up to speak was Bertie Bosredon, Assistant Director of Services (Information & Multimedia) at Breast Cancer Care. Bertie has been busy changing Breast Cancer Care’s social media strategy to utilise other social media platforms and contribute to overall integrated structure. More importantly changing the way they use social media to start listening and conversing with people online.

There were some key messages that resonated from his presentation, these were:

1. Have an integrated approach

Breast Cancer Care realise that a lot of conversations that were happening online were not necessarily happening in their space but through working with key influencers on other platforms supplying them with packaged information you can increase your presence online and collaborate with a lot more people.

2. Involve your members in planning

Bertie has been getting members involved in the planning of the current and future use of social media asking them what they would look for when engaging with Breast Cancer Care and how they could work this into a strategy that would best fit their organisational aims. Although a simple concept many companies forget that members and users usually know more about your brand then you do and can deliver some great insights.

3. Aligning all channels of communication

Breast Cancer Care have made sure that the social media strategy that they have been using is aligned with their offline print material so that it doesn’t matter where members go for the information. This means that they can use the channel that they prefer and the message will be consistent.

A popular point from Bertie: it doesn’t matter about the traffic to your site; care about how many people interact with your content even on other sites.

Social media marketing for not for profits

The next speaker was our very own Charlie Osmond from FreshNetworks. Charlie was speaking about how social media can be used for marketing and with specific reference to NFP organisations. Engaging people online is not about going for that quick win viral campaign but to successfully engage people online you need sustainable engagement.

Some key points to take away from Charlie’s presentations are:

1. The importance of the community manager

Engaging people online especially for sustainability requires a good community manager. They need to be able to reach out to people and facilitate discussions on a multitude of different platforms.

2. Know your tools but don’t let them drive your strategy

In order to be able to know what channels are available to you, you have to have a grasp of what’s in the vast social media environment. To create a successful strategy you should be looking at the aims of the business and the needs of the people that you want to engage.

3. To drive word of mouth for a certain cause take the ‘believe, belong and bear witness approach’

A great way to get people involved in a cause is to find people that believe in it, help them become involved in it and then help them bear witness to what they believe in this will help spread the message of the organisation through yours, and their own networks.

Steve Bridger on social media in charities

Finally but by no means least was Steve Bridger. Steve is a social media consultant and has some great (and extensive) history in community management for various charities. One of the more prevalent points of Steve’s presentation was the importance of putting people at the heart of your social media strategy

Some great points from Steve:

1. Help your advocates to amplify their voice

A lot of member organisations were using their current strategy to try and control conversations and go against ‘the flow’ of what people were online to do. They had a clear goal that they wanted to achieve and member organisations should be “enabling and empowering” these people to help deliver your message.

2. It’s about relationships not transactions

Member organisations and more specifically charities are currently set-up for transactions and are very ‘me’ focussed, there is greater value for charities if they position themselves for conversations and engagement.

3. You have to be in it to win it

A lot of companies are hoping for a win in social media what ever that may be but they don’t have a social media policy or ban social media access completely. A restrictive approach rather than a guided one causes bottlenecks at many organisations and restricts valuable internal knowledge.

It was great to see the focus on relationships and emphasis on the value rather then how much money can be made. There were lots of interesting perspectives and too many to write all in this blog post. A big thank you to all the people that attended there were some great discussions and insight from lots of different organisations and another big thank you to the speakers involved.

image via shutterstock

For a while I have found myself extolling the virtues of being a Social Media Pragmatist, rather than a Social Media Purist.

There are many “social media rules” to follow. But as an entrepreneur, and an engineer at heart, I’ve always felt the purtianical dictats must not fall foul of a basic rule of business:

Time and resources are limited. Focus them only on the things that will bring you the greatest return

So I was delighted to read this excellent post by Jason Fells today: Why Social Media Purists Won’t Last. And I enjoyed his calls to action:

“Make your company blog drive search results to the keywords you want to win. Present calls to action that lead your Facebook fans to buy your product. Entice Twitter followers to subscribe to your e-mail newsletter where you can present similar calls to action for purchase.”

Taking his conclusion one step further, I suspect there will be a backlash in 2010 against the Social Media Purists. Sadly the backlash will probably tar Social Media in general. And that’s why I say:

Long live the Social Media Pragmatist.

Here’s an idea I’ve ignored for a decade – virtual business cards.

Mashable just posted a list of 7 fantastic iphone business card apps. I had almost forgotten how in the late 90s there was a big expectation among early adopters that we’d all be switching from physical business cards to electronic ones.

I remember learning how to exchange business card details using my Palm V5. But I never used it. I never used it because it made people think I was weird, it took ages to try to connect and was just far more complicated than handing over a small card with my details.

Occasionally I exchange phone numbers accross mobile phones, but I can’t see the good old-fashioned business card being replaced by iPhone apps. If for no other reason than most people don’t have iPhones.

Am I missing something? Are the days of business-cards numbered for a good reason? Is social media going to kill the card?

This week Gordon Brown made a major announcement on YouTube that totally backfired. The UK press has been right to jump on this poor use of social media as a disaster for the Prime Minister. But let’s be clear, this is an example of how not to use a social media tool, it is not an example of the tool being broken.

Brown’s mistake, in this instance, was poor management and a lack of empathy. On a matter dear to the hearts of all MPs – their pay and expenses – rather than consult, he pronounced his verdict. That he used YouTube to do it is a sideshow. But it does provide a valuable lesson.

Social Media tools are just that. In the hand of a craftsman they can achieve great things, but if used in a sloppy manner they will not magically give great results. It’s the same for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and online communities.

And it’s exactly what I found myself talking about on a Social Media Panel at Internet World Expo this week. There can be an unhealthy obsession with getting a brand page up on Facebook or being sure to have a company Twitter account.

Don’t do it. Unless you have a good reason.

Separately, I noticed that Gordon Brown turned off the ability for viewers to comment on his video. Closing down the conversation – perhaps something purists would rally against. However, I suspect in this case, it was pretty good crisis management. Sure, people took the conversation elsewhere, but it did start to die down.

As ever, we’d be interested to hear your views.

You can watch the video is all it’s glory (including his special smile) here:

Some more reading

• Russian President Dmitry Medvedev launches video blog (freshnetworks.com)
• MP Expenses: Was This a Victory For Online Campaigning? (iaindale.blogspot.com)