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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FriendFeed the social aggregator and now real-time sharing and commenting application has upgraded to its new Front-End interface. Up until yesterday, users could opt to use the application in beta mode, which got mixed reviews. Some of the power users such as the ubiquitous Scoble were quite positive about it. It will be interesting to see how it is viewed by the wider audience.

Initial feedback is that if you have a large amount of friends, that the real-time update is just too much and far too much noise for the regular users. I am big fan of FriendFeed, I really like the fact that you can follow people and see their aggregated footprint, providing that they are posting interesteng and sharing relevant content. I use the FriendFeed notification application that displays updates in the corner of my screen. So I tend not to use the actual friendfeed interface. The diference that I see with FriendFeed to Twitter, is that you do get exposed to more information from users in FriendFeed, depending on what services they have decided to share – for instance, GoogleReader shares, Blogs, Feeds, video and photo sites etc…but providing people are sharing and posting interesting content, one gets to see and read a lot of good, wide and varied content. This of course can be construed as a massive noise wall by users who do not want exposure to this level of detail.

But the main point, I think for FriendFeed, is that it is still a tool for users who are very technically engaged, as opposed to new users of social applications. It will be interesting to see will it become a Twitter like tool in terms of popularity. I think possibly not, as the options and levels of perceived complexity may switch people off.

That said, it’s a great application and one that will be very interesting to watch. The guys who set it up are also Google veterans who know what they are doing. Also, saw a very interesting video with their chief interactive designer with Scoble on Kyte.tv. Worth checking out to get an insight into the new changes and what is coming down the tracks.

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Twitter it seems are hiring a product manager. Obviously taking the never-ending chatter about them making some money seriously. If you fancy it stick the CV in – could think of worse places to be .

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