The areas that I see that businesses need the most help and support in the online and digital sphere are around automated marketing solutions, content marketing, leadgen and lead nurturing programmes, and integrated CRM with digital, online and social channels. Coupled with, of course a strong emphasis on the need for serious digital strategy and planning, a comprehensive period of listening to the market, customers, competitors and ultimately the rolling out of tactical solutions that incoroporate all the points that I made at the start. This is a fascinating area for anyone with an interest in technology, marketing, sales, communications, organisational change etc…but yet what is amazing is that there is so much focus on the tools for the tools sake, and solutions that have not evolved over the past 7 years. I really cannot understand this.

Well in fact, I suppose I can. A lot of those who claim to be experts in all things Digital – seem to be very monothematic in terms of their skills and language that they use. They are particularly good at reducing the entire business world down to terms such as SEO, SEM, Email Campaigns, Twitter, Facebook without standing back and thinking what from a business perspective does a senior marketer, sales, communications or product management resource need and want to solve and why. There seems to be a total disconnect in the vocabularies and insights that the typical digital and online practitioner has in regards to addressing real business problems and understanding how businesses operate.

I think 2010 is going to be an interesting year for online practitioners. The business community is looking for far more integration of technologies rather than narrow focused skillsets and solutions. There’s a lot of room for improvement across the board for everyone operating in this area and those outfits who still have not migrated beyond PPC, SEM, SEO, Email Marketing solutions need to move the needle intellectually and digitally soon or risk being caught out in a very serious way.

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I’ve attached a presentation that I give on explaining social media (in its broadest sense) – i.e. social networks, digital content, listening tools, reputation management, content marketing etc… along with case studies of businesses using social media to both good and bad effect. Also covers  how social media platforms have become enablers for the mass spread of ideas and memes.  Have a read through and get back with any comments etc…

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A quick post to capture a few thoughts on what I observe re: social media prognostications and insights from people with an interest in this area. I am not interested in bashing social media gurus – like anything there’s people who are opportunistic and see an area where they can make money – and away they go – that’s life and it happens. I’m also completely bored listening to so-called experts pour scorn on anybody else who shows a professional interest in the area, as if they have a monopoly on the internet – give me a break – just because you’ve been writing a blog for a couple of years doesn’t give you the right to ridicule someone else for expressing an interest. Regarding social media, for me, its not so much about the specific tools (although they are very interesting too), but its much more about the behaviours that these tools have given rise to that is so phenomenally intriguing from a business, cultural, psychological, sociological etc… perspective.

On any given day, there are both commercial and non-commercial examples of how ubiquitous access to the internet coupled with the adoption of these newish (social) tools throws up scenarios that were just not possible five years previously. Somebody captures an incident on a mobile phone, uploads it to YouTube, gets picked up by a blogger, gets posted and tweeted, retweeted, picked up by mainstream media, and within a few hours hundreds of thousands (millions)of people have seen the original online and then it gets covered on national TV that night. A facebook page springs up and within a few hours there’s hundreds of thousands of fans. The velocity in which ideas, memes, incidents etc. can go from nothing to being a national or international story is amazing – and its going to keep on getting more pronounced as more people use these modes of communication. And of course people tend to focus on the high profile and headline grabbing examples, but of course there is also an infinite number of practical examples of social media being useful for instance when victims of floods, hurricanes, fires tweet for and receive help from emergency services – the red cross in the States use twitter as a key local tool to help out victims in distress situations.

The ability to find, watch, listen, and read the most incredibly comprehensive content is made so much easier by the usage of social technologies. This in itself constitutes a paradigm shift in information access. A lot of information was there before, but I think the whole model of following people and following the link trail they create, gives you access to information (and real people) that you just wouldn’t necessarily have found access to in Google or Yahoo – I know I certainly didn’t. So by using these tools – I think its fair to say that I have become smarter – I definitely have been exposed to a lot more ideas and knowledge than previously.

Back to the original purpose of writing this post, which is that I get tired listening to people prattling on about the tools and not focusing on the behaviour and looking beyond the obvious. Im tired of social media experts telling you how many blog posts you should post, and how you should use twitter, and how to create a facebook fan page or building a profile on linkedin. Its laughable, what anyone with an interest in this area should be looking at, is the massive shift in indvidual behavioural conduct and how millions of people are beginning to instinctively and innately think about sharing information as a matter of course, consuming and placing credibility on information sources that they didn’t even know existed a few years back, and how their ability to consume information from a hugely diverse ecosystem has evolved rapidly from a narrow set of channels to an infinite number both online and through mobile.

So it would be really nice to see more informed thoughtful debate across the board rather than one dimensional talk about THE TOOLS.

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Here’s a nice pithy video from Eric Amundson that goes through 5 ways to bulletproof and improve your wordpress blog – references some good tools and plugins that can help managing back-ups, customising the look and feel, improving search and improving security and performance.

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There’s been a couple of very poor examples of using social media in the UK and Ireland over the past week. In Ireland, it is the turn of the national Gas Company, Bord Gais, for really doing a spectacularly bad job at managing their reputation online. A while back they launched a new campaign to entice customers to switch providers of electricity over to them, in a campaign called The Big Switch, and with this they orchestrated an outreach programme to the online community where they identified 100 “influencers” and met up with them to solicit their feedback. They ran a good offline campaign and garnered quite a bit of online support from the blogosphere over the course of the campaign. They also instigated a Twitter account @TheBigSwitchIrl which did a pretty good job of engaging with the public – the guy who ran the account had a very natural way of interacting with followers and helped organise user participation in Ad shoots and ran competitions. So all that was good.

Then the company lost 75000 details with bank account numbers last week on laptops that were not encrypted when stolen (why they were on laptops in the first place is another question) and all of a sudden they put a gagging order on all social media activities. Obviously people were asking questions to the @TheBigSwitchIrl account, but rather than answering them – the only post they have issued since then has been a link to the press release – other than that there has been no communication on the account. They even reverted to getting the PR agency who deal with the company to start RT the link to the boilerplate press release – and left it to them to answer a few of the questions.

What this tells us is that Bord Gais actually don’t take any of this social media seriously – it was just a marketing ploy to go along with the campaign. And if things get serious (like losing 75000 people details), they will revert back to the old way, which is issue a bland press release and then say nothing, and wait till it all blows over. What they sould have done was start answering questions immediately on twitter, organise for the CEO to get himself onto twitter or some other social channel to answer questions and explain what the situation was, and exactly what would happen if people’s bank accounts started getting hacked, and let people know of all the measures that were now being taken to ensure no details would be unencrypted or kept on laptops, and also answer the legitimate questions that people had in relation to why their details were being downloaded onto laptops (by an apparently irregular process that violated the companies internal rules). But they didn’t and now their social media presence and reputation is very tarnished – it will be very difficult for them to re-start the good work that was done at the beginning. All because they reverted back to old school “tell them nothing” tactics. I think it’s time they started thinking more openly and realise that old style PR lock downs don’t work and people openly talk about what an appaling job you are doing – which hurts your brand.

In the UK, Habitat have done a really good job at damaging their reputation this week. It was noticed by SocialMediaToday that the new HabitatUK twitter account was using trending hashtags to trick users into clicking on their marketing driven tweets. For a big brand to be engaging in this was insane. They were hoping when people went onto twitter search that they would see their link and click through (and hopefully follow them). So Spam. This was wrong on so many levels. Not least because one of the hastags they used was #moussavi who is the main leader of the opposition in Iran which was obviously trending high last week. So basically, someone in Habitat decided to try and piggyback on a political movement where people were getting killed to get a few cheap links – it defies belief. So when this was pointed out, they then went and started trying to delete the posts. But thanks to twitter search, you cannot delete them until they come down off the twitter archive. So they are there for all to see. But rather than come out and hold their hands up and say they made a huge mistake they brazened it out and continued to tweet special offers etc…

Then today, Thusday 25th June, they come out and apologised and said that it was done out of ignorance and they obviously would never use a political issue to garner any benefit from. So at least they had the good grace to go and admit that they had messed up big time. But a couple of people then started asking who was actually doing the tweeting for them, was it an agency and if so why were they using an agency in the first place. Then Habitat come back and announce on the SocialMediaToday site that it was in fact an intern and he’s been fired. Whats amazing is that big organisations do not understand how the online community think. Blaming and firing an intern is nearly as bad as the initial cock-up. They need to take responsibility for their actions and be seen to do so. Why not fire the person who hired and allowed the intern to run roughshoud initally – thats who I’d be firing. And blaming an intern is ridiculous and it shows how little they value and understand social media and the online community in general.

Lessons out of all this, is that big organisations have a long way to travel before they understand how to participate meaningfully with the social web. And its about time that anyone in responsible roles started understanding and stop claiming ignorance – because there’s no excuse. And rather than hiring and firing junior roles for mistakes made, those who do the hiring should step up to the plate.

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