2012 - Servant of Chaos

Five Social Media Tools I Use Everyday

Just when I think that the world of social media has settled down – that I understand the linkages, measurements, approaches and benefits – something new comes along to upset my apple cart. That means that I am constantly juggling old with new, testing and learning and attempting to map past successes against new tools and techniques.

This is, in part, why we see lots of “5 tips” or “10 must haves” style articles. Constantly.

But I have noticed recently that many of these articles talk about the “100 best” or “99 favourite” tips, tools or techniques. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for 99 or even 100 anythings. But I do have time for five.

So I thought I’d share with you the five generally free social media tools that I use everyday. And if you have a moment, drop a comment below and tell me about your favourites too!

SocialMention – as a general purpose social media monitoring solution, it’s pretty good. It comes with decent analytics, sentiment analysis and even RSS feeds.
Topsy – want to know more about who, what and trends? This is where Topsy comes in.
Google AdPlanner – what’s currently going on in the world of your contestable keywords? Digging around in the beastly AdPlanner can let you know what you are up against
Posterous – even with its uncertain future (just been purchased by Twitter), Posterous is an awesome aggregating and distribution tool. You can bring content in and you can have Posterous auto-post out to many others. It’s your social media BFF
Tweetreach – no doubt you want to measure your efforts, right? Tweetreach have just launched a new infographic-style reporting engine that tells you just how far, how quickly and how/who pushed your hashtag into the viral stratosphere.

But let's take this a step further … maybe we should use some social media tools to keep track of these and others! So here's a list that you can use:

Open Your Mind to the Open Learning Revolution

The Social Way

I’ve been a passionate and curious learner for as long as I can remember. As a very small child, maybe 3 or 4 years of age, I created by own “office” is my grandparents’ house by opening the kitchen door and nestling down in the gap between the door and the gas heater. There I would spend hours reading, drawing and discovering.

When I had the opportunity to teach at university, I leapt at the chance. I loved the whole process of designing courses, engaging interesting and challenging “guest lecturers” and seeing the light in eyes of students when “everything clicks”.

But it wasn’t until I reached the corporate world that I understood the power and importance of learning. After my first 12 months with IBM, I realised that I had learned more in that year than I had in the previous five. It was a pressure cooker that made me bring all my experience, knowledge and capacity to new challenges – and to reassemble this in new ways. It was my own personal learning revolution – and helped me begin thinking about The Social Way.

Fast forward a couple of years and it’s clear that the opportunities, risks and challenges are social. I put together this presentation and speech on social learning back in 2009, presenting it along with my colleague Joe Westhuizen in Singapore, the US and Europe. But exactly how will social learning impact us all?

David Price is an education consultant, project manager, strategic adviser and public speaker. In 1994 he helped establish Sir Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, where he was Director of Learning for 7 years. Since then, he has led national projects in arts and education in the UK and advised companies, NFPs and govt departments internationally. The focus of his work is primarily about finding innovative ways to engage learners through more democratic and more relevant forms of education. He is a Senior Associate at the InnovationUnit.org.

And tonight – if you happen to live in Sydney, you can find out more about The Open Learning Revolution in a talk and workshop led by David Price. It’s bound to be fascinating … hope to see you there!

Email: The Offer They Can’t Refuse

Customer Experience, Infographics

I must admit that there is something immensely satisfying about email campaigns. These days, you can build a pretty creative campaign using free or open source tools like my current favourite, MailChimp, launch, send, measure and report on it’s effectiveness and then turn around and do it all again … with a great deal of ease.

And the nice thing is that the reporting is pretty much real time.

There are many similarities with blogging – the tracking and measurement, the control over content and messaging and even an understanding of user experience, pathing and conversion rates.

But where the consumption of blog content is relatively anonymous (unless you want to get very tricky), email surfaces a lot of interesting information about WHO reads your emails, WHAT they like and sometimes even WHY. And understanding this data, using it to deliver insight into your products, offerings, services or even the way you carry on the business of being social, will increasingly become a competitive advantage.

But before you get to data, you have to have something to send. And you want to maximise the effectiveness of every pixel on offer, right? This awesome infographic from the folks at Litmus provides all the right tips and tricks – and the shares the secret – a powerful call to action incorporating visual and text based cues. Check it out.

And don’t forget, you can subscribe to Servant of Chaos via RSS – or get the latest social business insight via the –> Social Way newsletter (see my use of arrows there!).

The Power of Zero

Storytelling, Videos

Great stuff from BBC Knowledge – telling the story and promoting wonder at the same time. Sounds like a dream job! Courtesy of Mark Hancock.

BBC KNOWLEDGE 60 from iamrader on Vimeo.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

5 Must-Read Posts

Whether we like it or not, social media is transforming every dimension of our life – at work, at home and with friends. The impact of this has far reaching implications for the way we live, what we value and the way we participate in our society. It is a complicated situation that can be easily ignored. These five must-read posts from last week shed some light on these topics:

Kate Carruthers leads out with a discussion on the reputation economy, employees and privacy and suggests that “privacy is truly dead”.
Greg Smith, Goldman Sachs executive, dropped a bomb shell, publishing his resignation letter on the New York Times opinion pages. It’s an astounding indictment of business practice that must be read.
Organisations need to be able to cope with (and support) their employees who use and engage with social media. Here are the US Army Reserve’s ten rules for social media practitioners. Great stuff.
With all this change taking place, it is making us question ourselves – our satisfaction, our happiness and even our position in the order of things. Umair Haque calls it a mid-life crisis. It feels to me closer to a Crisis of Purpose.
As we click our way across the internet, we leave footsteps – fingerprints – digital signifiers that indicate our temporal interest or attention. All this information is captured and stored – and can be pieced together and used to “engage” us. But where is the line between relevant and spooky? Valeria Maltoni asks someone who should know.

Creative is Back – Conversational Topics with Responsys’ @simonoz

Age of Conversation, Creativity, Customer Experience, Innovation, Social Media

As I sat bleary eyed in the audience at the Ad:Tech Sydney breakfast briefing this morning, three words sailed over the heads of the audience and slapped me awake – “creative is back”.

He said it again for added impact – creative is back.

The speaker, Responsys’ Simon O’Day, was part of a panel focusing on email marketing – but his interest was broader. He was talking lifecycle marketing, multi-channel and data.

I caught up with him after the panel for a quick conversation and to get a greater sense of what he was hinting at. Here are some of the themes we discussed:

Creative is back: there is a clear opportunity but also a challenge in the years ahead – after all, we are now all receiving vast amounts of email every day. The opportunity and challenge is to invest in creative and bring it into the heart of our campaigns and use that to cut through.

Data drives insights: there is a vast amount of data now at our fingertips – but rather than delivering insights, most marketers are drowning. Increasingly we need to look to technology to help us sift through the information that is available to us. My view was that we needed some creative partnering to take place – between the marketing teams, agencies and companies like Responsys. To make this data work for us all, we need the deep expertise and the maturity to collaborate. Of course, that’s easier said than done!

Data is everywhere: We have our mailing lists and our databases – and that is all goodness. But social networks are now delivering additional data points that can deliver fantastic insights – as long as you know where to look. We should be looking for these opportunities beyond our own organisations – and tapping into the networks of value that already exist.

Imagine a world of 100% plus open rates: This is where it got interesting. As we spoke, Simon became more and more animated. He explained that hidden deep within the data – what Responsys call “profile extensions” – is information that allows you to engage people in a highly relevant way. The way I understood this was that a new piece of data – like a status update or a change in profile information (whether in your system or on Facebook or Twitter etc) could trigger an engagement – like an SMS alert, an email or an @ message. And because it was highly targeted and relevant, it generates 100%+ open rates.

So what we are seeing, really, are micro-segmentation capabilities that are based on people’s behaviours rather than demographic or other forms of segmentation. It’s pretty exciting – slightly spooky – but also the way of the future.

So what do you think? Is this deep level of targeting, when coupled with a focus on permission a way for us to deal with email overload? Is this a new way of understanding trust or is it going in the opposite direction? You tell me.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

5 Must-Read Posts

It’s been a busy fortnight (I love using that work even if it’s a little archaic these days).

In fact, the first couple of months of the year have flown by – and to be honest, I am feeling a little nostalgic for the time when January was a “slow month” and we could take some time to think and plan before rushing into project action.

But no matter how busy you are, you’ll want to read these gems from last week. There’s only five. It will be your best investment for the week!

Stowe Boyd shares this conversation between Fast Company writer, Linda Tischler and Roger Martin, author of The Design of Business. It’s a great read and plays to the type of thinking I love – Why Companies Need Futurists, Not Analysts.
Just because much of social media is free, it doesn’t mean it is cheap. My buddy, Drew McLellan has produced a Social Media Strategy Workbook that you can download for free. But putting your strategy into action will tax your brain.
Do we still believe in civic responsibility? Should we? Danielle Chiaverini asks some challenging questions.
A lot of times – especially in social media – we talk about “just doing it”. This has appeal for those who have a vested interest in “talkability” – after all, you need a reason to share, right? But Valeria Maltoni asks, what’s the value of thinking in a do culture.
The team at Zeus Jones have put together this great presentation that just shares “what’s on our minds at the moment”. I love the simplicity of that concept – and the fact that they are sharing ideas that are bourn out of their work with their clients.

Are You the Agent of Your Own Change?

Conferences, Innovation, Vibewire

Have you ever made a deep change in your life? Did you look at the status quo and decide you didn’t like the shape, smell or grind that defined your life? If so – did you have the courage to change? Did you make that u-turn?

At the recent fastBREAK event – Vibewire’s co-production with the Powerhouse Museum, five speakers explored this topic. My favourite was this one story by Phil Gomes. He explains how he was able to turn his interest and passion for bikes and cycling into a job as an online editor with SBS Cycling Central.

It wasn’t easy – or even quick. But Phil makes the point – “be the agent of your own change”.

Infographic: Pin It to Win It

Infographics

Just when you think there can’t possibly be ANOTHER social network to add to the crowded list – along comes Pinterest. Not only has Pinterest been able to garner an audience – it’s one of the fastest growing social networking sites in history, generating 11.7 million visits in the month of January.

My view is that this growth has been spurred on largely through integration with the Facebook Open Graph (Pinterest was one of the first 60 partners). The strategic alignment of platforms like this will see new entrants having to take sides in what will become a war of ecosystems – Google v Facebook. It will make for interesting times – and certainly lead to consolidation over the coming year.

But coming back to Pinterest – we can certainly expect to see an increasing use by brands hoping to share in the massive volume of click through traffic that the site generates. The cool thing for brands and for businesses is that they will need to focus on topics not products or risk having their pinboards deleted. That means that – perhaps – brands will start to understand the nature of “adjacent conversations” and the power that they lend to your social media marketing efforts.

Note: Before you get too excited about Pinterest, take a quick look at an alternative view – the RISKS of using Pinterest.

MDG Advertising has created this neat infographic to highlight some of the more salient facts and figures.