Subscribe to this blog’s feed
Connect / View my profile
Monthly Archives: January 2012
Overcoming social ‘overwhelm’ by setting modest goals
Do you ever have that sinking feeling when you open up Tweetdeck/Feedly/Facebook etc? I don't know about you but these are the kinds of things that frequently go through my mind:
everyone's so much more of an expert than me everyone's business is doing so much better than mine people are so much better at blogging/tweeting/interacting regularly than me I have nothing to say that anyone will want to hear aaaagghhh!
But from what people tell me, actually most of us are in the same boat: trying to understand everything, keep up with our peers, not get left behind, not be SEEN to get left behind…
What does it take to become a more ‘social’ business?
Recently I followed a really throught-provoking webinar put on by Social Media Today, in which Maggie Fox of Social Media Group interviewed Sandy Carter, IBM Vice President, Social Business Evangelism and Sales. The theme was (broadly) how businesses can become more social.
A lot of webinar opportunities pass through my inbox each day, but I liked the description of this one, in particular the assertion that “It’s not all about technology, nor is it so much about marketing technique; it’s more about changing basic assumptions and getting comfortable with the new communications reality …”
Sandy shared many great insights based on her experience at IBM and her own research (she’s an prodigious author and blogger), but the one thing that jumped out at me was her phrase ‘culture eats strategy for lunch.’ In other words, when you’re looking at changing a company to become a more social business, you need to find out early on just how resistant the company’s culture is going to be to such a change.
Book review: The Shallows, How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. By Nicholas Carr
I recently finished reading Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' (subtitle: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember'). It's just the sort of book I enjoy – a new way of looking at things, intelligently argued, well researched, accessibly written. (Is it true, I wonder, that we most admire the books we wish we'd have written ourselves?)
Funny how one of the first subjects Carr brings up is Marshall McLuhan, out of favour for years in media studies circles. McLuhan's famous assertion that 'the medium is the message' is, for Carr, very true when it comes to the internet.
Who ‘owns’ an employee’s Twitter followers?
Some interesting debate in Marketing last week about employee Twitter accounts and who owns the relationship with followers should the employee leave the company.
On the one hand, media lawyer Mark Smith warns that companies should have a clear social media policy in which it is stated (for example) that employees "are not permitted to add business contacts… to their personal Twitter accounts, as this will allow the employee to easily retain details of business contacts in the event that they leave."
But Becky Brown, Director of Social Media for Intel, says that the company's goal is to make all employees active social media participants on behalf of the company and "ownership remains with the individual." Employees create and manage their relationships on Twitter, therefore they are theirs to take with them if they leave.
