Do you know who your friends are?

If you had just been to a job interview, would you try to add your interviewer on Facebook?

If a client sent you a friend request, would you accept?

If your boss asked you to change your profile picture, would you?

Each of these scenarios has happened to me or a family member, and yet discussing them, we all had different opinions. If we can’t even agree, how on earth is a company supposed to lay down the law on social media use?

Let’s face it, Facebook is a minefield. Some people are happy to let it all hang out, others jealously guard their privacy and everyone is perfectly entitled to use it as they please… until they mention where they work. That’s when it all changes.

If your company doesn’t yet have guidelines, I’d really recommend these – from the General Teaching Council for Scotland – as a basis. It pretty much boils down to one, common-sense line:

“A teacher should never share information with students in ANY environment that they would not willingly or appropriately share in a school or school-related setting or in the community.”

It seems daft that it should need to be spelled out like this, but I guess when you’re updating a status from a phone or in a rush, you can forget the fact that all 300 of your ‘friends’ can see it, share it, comment on it and basically pass it around. I can only suppose the people who post they’re hungover when they’ve called in sick, bitch about their boss or slate their company policies online haven’t checked their privacy settings or have forgotten who their ‘friends’ are.

I feel quite strongly, though, that it should work both ways. I hate hearing that people have accepted friend requests from line managers and new employers because they’ve felt they couldn’t say no. I’m one of the people who keeps Facebook very private, so I’ll often send back a message with my LinkedIn and Twitter details before I decline. I’m self-employed, but if I worked for a company I’d be leaving that field blank. The reality is that as soon as you say who you work for, you are representing them. This is true in real life so of course it’s true online and therefore your boss is, I think, entitled to ask you to change a dodgy profile pic or remove a controversial comment.

Do you agree?

The transcript is as follows:

I’ve only got five minutes so rather than bore you with theory I will just tell you what we did to sell a product on Twitter. Hopefully then you can see the theory in action and apply it to your own product or service.

Impact Online was hired by John McMonagle who was going on Dragons’ Den. He owns a fish and chip shop – a floating one in Clydebank – but he’d invented an inflatable car bed. It was really cool – he made me go in it  - it was very comfy and I thought it would be great for T in the Park. So we set up a Twitter account for the product  in order to gether feedback and drive traffic to the website where the product was on sale.

We chose a Twitter name that had both the brand name and the product in it, so that it could be easily found. The brand was Karnap and the product was a car bed – so the Twitter name was KarNapCarBed, using capitals to make it easier on the eye.

We researched Dragons’ Den fans and followed them, starting conversations with as many as possible – time was of the essence before the programme on BBC2 on Sunday night. We researched them using a variety of methods, primarily the keyword search on Tweetdeck.

Did you know only about 17% of people use Twitter.com? Everyone else uses Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, which allow you to do much more advanced things, like schedule tweets, track stats and set up columns for specific search terms.

Dragons’ Den was on at 9pm on Sunday night. There were two hashtags for the programme on Twitter – BBCDragons and DragonsDen. Hashtags are like labels you attach to your tweet and it’s a live link so if you click it, you’ll see everything everyone else is saying about the same thing.

So we set up two columns on Tweetdeck to follow these hashtags. We found a lot of followers this way too.

We knew time was limited to the duration of the programme and a little before and after so we scheduled tweets to go out at three minute intervals during this time. We used all the relevant key words and a link to the website. This link was shortened so that it was a unique link and we could track how many clicks it received.

Then, during the programme we answered every tweet mentioning the bed. I think there were over 100. Every time someone mentioned it, we answered and included the unique website link. Every comment, positive or negative, got a response. Some people laughed and said they were taking the mick. Others were delighted – and congratulatory that John had gone ahead and made the product himself. A few were chuffed to bits to get a personal message from a “celebrity”!

We kept tracking the messages during the week for people who’d recorded it to watch it and gathered all the feedback. We grouped all the followers according to various criteria using the private list system – private because we didn’t want anyone else stealing our market research.

Afterwards we could see how much traffic came to the website from Twitter, we had feedback straight from the consumers as if we’d held a focus group and we had direct sales. People were saying “I want that” and we were saying  “OK here you go” – that’s a pretty powerful sales tool.

Now obviously an appearance on a TV programme is going to be an example not many people will be able to exactly replicate. But you can still piggyback on a hashtag to promote yourself, you can set up unique links to your website so you can measure the impact of Twitter and you can directly reach your target market by keyword research and tracking. Then a little bit of old-fashioned conversation and salesman’s tactics will do the rest!

I was very kindly invited to speak by Jacky – Martin Jack, managing director of Think Different Events. Jacky is one of those guys who just gets it. He has spent a year building a network which, in my opinion, is one of the best in Glasgow. It’s free, so he’s not making any money from it, and he tirelessly nurtures it. He blogs every week. He features all the new attendees. He links like an SEO pro, making sure that everyone’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube Channel and size of shoe is available on the Business Banter website.

He is the best type of networker – an enabler. His favour bank is bursting. He will never have to pay for PR or advertising because everyone knows him, he knows everyone and whatever he needs he will always be able to crowd source. If you don’t know him, someone you know will and when you meet him, you’ll like him.

So it’s my pleasure to be speaking at his event next Tuesday morning (20th Sept) at Esquires Coffee House (115 Hope Street). I will be talking about how to sell on Twitter. I only have five minutes, so I’ll be sticking to the key points and probably talking really fast. I’m going to tell the attendees how a client of mine went on Dragons’ Den with an amazing product. I’m going to show how we tracked opinion and used Twitter as our sales platform. I’m hopefully going to show people how they can do the same with their product or service.

In five minutes. Hmmmm.

So if you’re going, please stick around so we can chat afterwards! And don’t forget to register here – its free!

A brave, but calculated move by Sunday Herald

So it turns out Ryan Giggs name was not revealed by ‘disgruntled tabloid journalists’ on Twitter – rather a ‘leftie banker’ from Guildford.
If, like me, you’re a bit fed up with this super-injunction debate, you’ll probably be thinking ‘who cares?’

Well, I’d argue that this proves something I’ve always suspected: journalists use social media differently and, dare I say it, more responsibly than those without media training.

When I was doing my postgrad, there was a huge emphasis on learning the legal consequences of what you publish. Defamation is a complex issue, as is contempt of court. You really can’t call yourself a hack until you understand that there are constraints on printing stories that have nothing to do with stifling freedom of speech.

Twitter is just another publishing platform and I think it should be bound by the same laws as the printed media. Of course, in practice, this is almost impossible. The immediate nature of the microblogging site means messages spread so fast that you can miss entire stories by simply not checking your feed one morning. It doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences.

If you’re a business using Twitter, you need to have at least a working knowledge of the relevant laws and what might happen if you post something vaguely controversial. A throwaway comment can be retweeted, commented on, picked up by other media – and before you know it, you’re at the centre of all the wrong kind of PR.

The top three results refer to the website. Then:

4^th: Twitter

5^th: Twitter

6^th: Facebook

7^th: YouTube

If I told you Networkingolf had also, within a week of this search, featured conspicuously in The Scotsman and The Daily Record, would you be surprised not to find any evidence of this until 14^th position in the Google search results (4^th on page two)?

The point is, having several social channels as part of your campaign gives you an instant online boost. But it doesn’t stop there, there’s the inbuilt call to action. If someone clicks on a website link, they may have a look around, they may make a note of the phone number, if you’re lucky they’ll buy your product. If someone clicks on a Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn link they are far more likely to act. They’ll click ‘follow’, ‘like’, ‘connect’, they’ll leave a comment, hopefully they’ll share their discovery and best of all, they’ll start a conversation with you.

This is only the beginning – the hard part is out of the way because you have their attention. Holding it is where the skill comes in! It’s not enough to think ‘great, I’ve got their details, I’m going to bombard them with sales messages’. People see through this very quickly and it’s just as easy for them to ‘unfollow’ and disconnect from you entirely. Offer them value in the form of useful information, entertainment, special offers, good service and you’re far more likely not just to convert them into a customer, but convert them into a loyal customer who feels an affinity with you.

So will social be playing its part in your next campaign?

Reach a wide, diverse audience by sharing content online

There’s no point in creating a fantastic piece of content for your company if no one’s going to see it – but people often underestimate the sharing stage.
For me, at the beginning, shyness held me back. I’d tweet once that I’d blogged and hope that people would come. I didn’t necessarily tell my Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts and I certainly didn’t ask anyone to pass on the link for me.
I’m pleased to say I’ve stopped being so bloody British and realised that sharing content is not only socially acceptable, it’s necessary, especially for businesses. If I’ve spent time creating something, I want it to reach the widest possible audience in the shortest possible time. As was highlighted at Friday’s New Media Breakfast, share buttons are one of the best ways to do this – they allow the viewer to pass the link on to their various networks in seconds. You can find the code for share buttons easily – here they are for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The Facebook button is the most important – organiser Gordon showed a statistic that 44% of content is shared through this network – but the LinkedIn share button arguably has more potential. It allows you to both publish the link on your profile and select which of your groups you want to share the content with, increasing the audience by thousands.
The position of your share buttons can also make a difference – Gordon showed an example of a woman whose traffic had jumped 200% after she changed their position. If you want your viewer to share a whole web address, position your button on a sidebar. Otherwise, have your buttons within the content. With a long blog it could be more worthwhile to have your share buttons at the top of the post; if it’s shorter, or a video or picture, perceived wisdom is they’re better at the bottom. Keep an eye on your analytics and test if the traffic increases one way or the other.

When you’re sharing your own content it’s important to think about timing.

• When will your audience be online?
• Can you time it to coincide with another, similar online conversation? Gordon gave the example of running a golf promotion the same week as the Ryder Cup, and tagging tweets with the #RyderCup hashtag.
• Can you ask colleagues to also pass on the links?
• Can you arrange a mutually beneficial system of being the first to comment on each other’s content to get the ball rolling?
• Can you establish competitions which encourage people to get involved online?
• Are you linking online with offline? Increasingly, businesses are advertising in their premises the fact they’re on Facebook or Twitter.
• Finally, something I believe quite strongly is that people will only share content that reflects well on them – so make it worth sharing!

What did you take from Friday’s New Media Breakfast? Have you found any tricks for sharing online?

Last week I made this video blog about the snow and the different reactions people had
to coping with the weather. Then Monday happened.
A weekend thaw lulled us all into a false sense of security and I, like most of the country,
ventured out in the Monday rush hour only to get a nasty surprise. In a matter of minutes
the roads turned into ice rinks and the blizzards reduced visibility to practically zero. The
whole country ground to a halt.
We’ve spent the week recovering, if you can call it that. I know I’m not alone in losing serious
productivity – rescheduling meetings, postponing deadlines and helping out clients and
neighbours alike as best I could. But rather than moan about the woeful response by so
many agencies, I thought I’d focus on the silver lining – Twitter to the rescue.
If anyone still needs convincing of the power of this microblogging service with a
misleadingly-cutesy name, the weather crisis should prove its worth. Bus companies
used it to tell us which routes were running, councils used it to tell us which schools were
closing, universities used it to tell us which classes were cancelled and, most importantly,
motorists used it to find out which roads were passable. (The police, to my knowledge,
provided no such service, nor did the Scottish government.)
I know at least two journalists who got some fantastic human interest stories out of a little
mournful tweet. I know my sister, stuck in a car, desperate for the loo, took great comfort
from the little tweets of sympathy from her friends. I know I laughed when my friend tweeted
he was building a snowman on the M77 with the other fed-up drivers. (If only he’d taken a
picture!)
For me, sitting at home, feeling guilty about staying indoors when my husband had dug out the
car and left for work an hour early to give himself plenty of time, Twitter was like an all-seeing
eye. People assured me I’d done the right thing, told me which roads would have been blocked,
which trains would have been cancelled and how slippy the pavements really were (the ones
who know I’m pregnant were particularly vociferous, which was very touching – thanks guys!).
Add to the Twitter omniscience the fact that I can easily work remotely, and the week, while
frustrating, was not a complete write-off. I wonder, if more companies were set up like mine,
how much of Monday’s madness could have been averted. If, like the Transport Minister, we
hadn’t ignored the Sunday night weather warnings and had all been told to work from home
on Monday, would the number of poor souls risking hypothermia been reduced or even
prevented completely?
Wishful thinking, I’m sure, but I’ll be interested to see if businesses learn any lessons at all
from our snow woes.