After: distractions, distractions, distractions.

Well here we are at the end of this blogging experience, I promised that I would finish off with a review of my blogging experience so here’s a wee summary:

Most of the way through I found it really easy to be myself but I also think it might have gotten in my way a little bit. I feel like I might have suffered a little from ‘style over substance’ in order to make my blog more readable (and hopefully enjoyable) to a wider audience. I mean I read really great posts by others about Web 2.0 and Cook’s 4C’s but I just didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing. Yesterday I had a mild panic about my stubbornness, I mean its hard to be yourself when you know there’s a grade being handed down to you at the end.

‘Your personality gets an F-‘

The other goal I had when I started out was to stay humble. It’s hard to rate myself on this one (I wouldn’t want to come across as cocky or anything) but I think I did ok. Being a confessed Social Media addict I actually kind of started out thinking I knew all there was to know about Social Media but I’ve learnt a lot over the weeks and all the wonderful comments I have received have really kept me thinking and wanting to learn even more to provide better content.

and all of your comments!

As for WordPress as a blogging platform, I’m not a fan. I’m one of those people who doesn’t read the instructions, I just like to figure it out for myself. I found WordPress to be way more complicated than the average Social Media site (I still can’t seem to figure out about 90% of its functions). Personally I would have much preferred to create this blog on Tumblr and I think that it might be something for the tutor to consider next year. Last week Tumblr reached 100 million blogs and in January this year the word ‘Tumblr’ surpassed the word ‘blog’ on Google Search.

As long time Tumblr user I’m probably kind of biased though.

My blogging high point  has been the views, shares, follows, likes and comments. My low point has been all the distractions. It takes me forever to write a post because every time I open a tab to find a link/picture/meme/gif/video to insert into the blog I get distracted, like yesterday when I watched the top 100 most viewed YouTube clips of 2012. I try to justify these distractions as ‘research’ but its more like procrastination.

Overall I’ve really enjoyed blogging, I might even consider doing it again sometime. Although I’m afraid without having a built in audience (my classmates) it will take a lot more hard work to generate interest. Maybe I’ll take my own advice and feel the fear and do it anyway.

Thank you all so much for reading!

 

Social Media engagement: Feeling the fear and doing it anyway

Like me there are many businesses out there still sceptical about the benefits of Social Media. Niall Cook in his book Enterprise 2.0 has some pretty dismal engagement statistics on the matter, but I wonder how true they are as his book was published way back in the dark ages of 2008. Things change so fast on the Internet you have to take any analysis with a pinch of salt.

I’ll take my salt with a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila (in a cat woman suit) please.

So how do you change a company culture of scepticism into to one of Social Media engagement? Cook talks about awareness, education and culture as being the three key factors. Awareness and education can be created by utilising your office’s Social Media addicts (look for those constantly checking Facebook on their phones) and turning them into noisy advocates and enthusiastic trainers. For that to work though you also need to create a culture where everyone is involved in Social Media. Companies don’t necessarily have to go as far as Zappo’s, whose entire staff is on Twitter, but rewarding staff who use an internal Wiki could be a more comfortable starting place to encourage cooperation. I say this because if I got rewarded for all the pages I’d created on my company’s Wiki I’d be rich I tell you, RICH!

This is what I imagine the rich me would look like.

Internal Social Media platforms are one thing but external platforms seem to be an entirely different beast. It seems to me that it’s not so much the staff resisting here but the managers. I suppose it comes back to a fear of, or resistance to collaboration. Management has to relinquish some control and let staff and customers participate and shape the conversation about the organisation. This exactly is why I like Social Media so much, it has the potential to sabotage the old Top-Down style of running an organisation (or even a country). Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, I’m meant to be encouraging you here, but Bottom-Up adoption is how you promote meaningful content and create communities. 

Communities like Bronies for example, 20-something dudes who can’t get enough of the My Little Pony cartoon.

The entertainment and not-for-profit industries seem to do the whole Bottom-Up thing pretty well on Social Media. Can you think of any organisations that do it well? I think Cannon with its World of EOS community does a good job, it makes me wish I owned one of their DSLR’s that’s for sure. How do you feel about Bottom-Up?  Is it a necessary evil or a magical future?

Social Media is Bullshit: Is Social Media success out of reach for small business?

A few months back I mentioned I was starting this blog to my hairdresser and we got talking about Social Media and small business. I asked him all sorts of questions about the salon’s Facebook account and whether or not he thought the business was seeing any benefit from it. He didn’t really seem to think so because there was little customer participation and it seemed to him that it wasn’t as effective as a website. Then later that week I stumbled across this book…

and my head exploded!

Without even reading the book I suddenly thought that I had solved the Internet or Social Media or something. I mean, I had found a good business that Social Media wasn’t really working for and I had found a published book whose title negated everything I had read about Social Media so far. It was all a scam! I was studying a pointless subject! Everything I had read thus far had been a LIE!

Ok, so I may have overreacted slightly but it made me view Social Media and how businesses use it, with more scepticism than before. If you believe the hype, Social Media is a wonderful tool for constructive communication that can build communities of like minded individuals. But it’s not magic, it’s hard work. It’s a full time job. And maybe that’s what makes successful utilisation just out of reach for the average small or medium sized business, time being money and all that. In that sense Social Media is bullshit or at least the promises it makes are bullshit. I’m not advocating staying away from Social Media, I’m just saying lets all take off the rose tinted eyewear and get real about its potential for the average company. After all we can’t all afford to hire this guy to go viral:

Oh look another handsome, half-naked guy on my blog…. oops.

I barely have the time to keep up with my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, LinkedIn, WordPress and Vine accounts let alone make content for them all so how is a small business meant to do it on top of, you know, running their business?

Do you work for a business that uses Social Media? Is it someone’s full time occupation to manage it? Is it living up to the hype? I used to be really critical of my company for being so sceptical of the benefits of Social Media but I think I’m starting to see their point of view.

 

Hostages, Terrorists, Victims and Champions: How Customer Types Influence Feedback Through Social Media

The voyeur in me is far more intrigued by the flow of communication via social media from customer to company than vice versa. Carefully crafted, strategy aligned, spell-checked organisational propaganda is just so dull by comparison. 

Telstra informs its Facebook followers of its Easter charity work. Yawn. Meanwhile, Telstra customers rage over terrible products and incompetent service. Wait a moment while I get the popcorn.

The ‘Posts By Other’s (above) is probably a business’ greatest social media fear: that customers will say mean things about them in a public space where everyone can see, especially because what they say is unlikely to be constructive criticism and more likely to be a tirade of emotional word-vomit, chunky style. Don’t worry I won’t include an image of that below.

Instead, here is a baby meerkat to cleanse your mental-image palette.

This might be a pretty compelling argument to stay far, far away from Facebook etc but the problem with the Internet is that these things will get said regardless of whether you have an ‘official’ Twitter or Facebook account. People can’t help themselves, we are addicted to sharing even the most mundane stories/ideas/facts on social media because, as research has proven: Obsessive Facebook Updates Are Good for You?!. We actually get instant gratification by feeling more connected, so we especially can’t help sharing if we happen to be one of the six active customer types.

This wee diagram was borrowed from a book by Johnston, R., and Clark, G. called ‘Service Operations Management : Improving Service Delivery (2008). Thanks!

The above image gives a very condensed explanation of the customer type theory, I recommend looking it up if you actually plan on using it. I love this theory because consumers (me included!) love to hate corporations but guess what friends? Some customers are just as loathsome. If you’ve ever worked as a waitress you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. And just look at the dramatic names these customer types have: Victim; Champion; Hostage; Terrorist! But drama aside, categorising your customers is a great strategy for businesses engaging through social media. Companies can learn how to encourage customer participation or positive feedback and to diffuse or eject the negative customers.  I mean if you’re going to get covered in word-vomit you might as well know how to clean it off.

How about you? Which businesses turn you into a terrorist? Have you ever ranted on their Facebook wall? Did they try and fix the situation or was it ignored? Leave your comments here for instant good feels 😉

Confessions of a Social Media addict: Is advertising via Social Media helpful or harmful?:

Let me paint you a word picture of what was supposed to be my night last night. I was going to relax in a sandalwood scented bubble bath while listening to the audiobook for The Great Gatsby. After which I was going to put on my fluffiest dressing gown and settle on the couch for a facial-manicure-pedicure combo while watching Anna Karenina. It was going to be the perfect wind down to a stressful week.

Here’s what I actually did: I sat at my computer and watched almost 6 hours of YouTube.

Guys I’m not even exaggerating.

So here it is, finally: My name is Stella and I’m addicted to Social Media.

My substances of choice are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr and now WordPress (yeah thanks university for adding to my problem). In fact, WordPress has been so distracting lately that every time I log on to try and blog I end up spending hours reading advice blogs and learning nailart techniques.

This was the result of last weeks procrastination session, which of course I had to Instagram and share on Facebook.

Which brings me to the point of this post, I may have just started learning about Social Media from a business perspective but I could probably fill a Lord-of-The-Rings-sized trilogy with my experience as a customer/consumer on Social Media. I’m not talking about businesses having their own facebook/twitter/instagram (etc) accounts here, that’s a discussion for another day, I’m talking about the bombardment of advertising I’m exposed to as a Social Media addict.

At the end of my 3 volume, 1,500 page rant I would probably draw the following conclusions:

1. I rarely engage with businesses on Social Media; and
2. I hate constantly being advertised at on Social Media.

Here are two really great clips about how ‘in the future’ companies will be able to stop using outdated demographic information to advertise to you through Social Media and start to tailor advertising to your specific interests.

If you ask me this can’t come soon enough because if I have to see another weight-loss ad on my Social Media feeds, steam may start issuing from my ears.

My problem with current forms of advertising on Social Media is that it seems really condescending. Let me give you an example: One of my favourite YouTube cewebrity’s is Grace Helbig who has a channel called DailyGrace. Basically she’s a 20-something woman who posts 5 video’s a week about….. um….. everything? nothing? I watch her show every day and I can’t even begin to come up with a decent synopsis, but I love her and I think she’s hilarious. At the moment Grace is partnering up with Subway for some kind of promotion or something.

See this is how much I don’t like being advertised at, I have no idea what the promo is for, nor do I care to investigate further to find out, not even for the sake of this blog.

This is what I think Subway’s advertising strategy is trying to get me to think:

This is what I actually think about their sponsorship:

Now I’m sure Subways’ strategy is probably way more complex than I’m making it out to be but that’s not really my point. I eat Subway but I’m not going to eat more Subway because they advertised with DailyGrace, I actually may end up eating less Subway because of this.

So what do you think about advertising on Social Media? Is it helpful or harmful for businesses? Would you actively engage or disengage with a company because of how they advertise online?

Before: Being yourself and staying humble

I’ve had a crazy amount of traffic on the blog in the last two days so I thought I better get my A into G and post my first post. If you haven’t already, head over to the About This Blog and the About Me pages to find out what I’m doing here.

So here goes….

I want to bookend this project with two posts about my experience with blogging, a sort of before and after if you will.

And hopefully the after picture will be as impressive as Neville Longbottom’s

I’ve been reading some course material about blogging this week and two things struck me that I wanted to share.

When talking about how to write a successful blog, one point that gets made is that bloggers should be interesting and authentic, and personally I think the best way to do that is to be yourself.

Bee yourself

Before I had started reading and researching I hadn’t actually considered being myself on this blog. I guess because the blog is being written for a university assignment I was thinking that I would be the scholastic, professional version of me rather than letting my freak flag fly. That me would have come up with a robust plan, written countless drafts and done lots and lots and lots and lots of research before even typing a single word, but that’s not really how blogs are meant to work right?

You said it sand-eating baby!

There’s a really great Ted Talk by Simon Sinek here, about the importance of selling ‘who you are’ and not ‘what you do’ if you want customers to engage, identify and be loyal to your brand. It’s one of my favourite Ted Talks and I’d like to try and employ this concept on my blog.

Another reason that I think authenticity is going to be important, and bear with me here cause this one might make you get uncomfortable in the feels, is because of copying. Under normal circumstances, sharing a blog and having people expand on, copy or blatantly steal your ideas is par for the course (did I really just use a golf cliché?) but my classmates and I are being graded on our blogging efforts. It’s almost like taking a test where the teacher says its ok for the person next to you to look at your answers.

So what are we blogging about next week guys?

It’s hard not to be influenced in some way by what you’re reading/seeing on the blogs of your peers. This isn’t a bad thing if you’re going to make it your own but the ugly competitive side of me wants to ‘win’ at blogging and therefore not share anything with anyone. That horrible confession brings me to my next point.

The other thing that struck me as interesting was that bloggers should try and be humble, this one might be kind of tough for me (which you might have figured out from the above paragraph). If you haven’t read Cracked’s article called 5 Ways You’re Accidentally Making Everyone Hate You you should take a gander, it explains better than I can why I’m probably pretty useless at being humble.

I think its hard to stay humble on the Internet. It’s so easy to get defensive when people leave feedback, especially if it’s negative. Commenter’s sometimes feel like backseat drivers that you’d rather punch than listen to.

This is my first real blog so comments and feedback are going to be really important if I’m going to achieve a Neville Longbottom style transformation. I promise to take three deep breaths before and after reading any feedback and I’ll try to take things on constructively, humble styles. So please get involved, follow, share, comment and like and definitely call me out on my shit.

P.S. A little shout out here to my sister who transformed my horribly pixelated banner into a vector. Thanks sis!