Social Media Actually – Communities

Last week I gave a presentation on the practical aspects of using Social Media in various sectors, starting with Communities. The choice was pretty simple. In 2005-2006 I freelanced between BBC Radio Manchester and QT Radio (under CSV Media’s umbrella), doing lots of radio programming, interviewing, and presenting. QT Radio and Radio Manchester’s Action Desk (later Interaction) both focused on communities: how to engage them, how to let them contribute positively, etc. In April 2006 I also took part in a mediabridge event that connected a gallery at Manchester’s Cornerhouse with a studio in Tijuana in Mexica. The topic was again how to empower communities through the use of the Media.

I’ve been using various social sites and tools since as early as 2000; my life has been predominantly web-based since 2005 (although I can spend days offline, too). But you can surely imagine the surprise I’ve taken away from an event at The Circle Club in Manchester where three speakers were debating Social Media. It was a perfect deja-vu moment: three years on, communities seemed to be in the same kind of rut. How to gain the voice? How to be heard? What to do to make this happen? Just as they used traditional media (radio and TV) in 2005-2006 to gain presence, so now they were trying to use Social Media to the same end.

Whilst this is a never-ending process of a re-discovery of the wheel, I created this first presentation as a response to communities’ questions, and also as a way to trial the reaction to the possibility of measuring the ROI for communities, individuals, and non-profits. We tend to put a lot of effort and passion in our work, so it is understandable that we are then disappointed with measely results. The thought I was trying to put across is: if there is a reason for publishing something on the web, then we’re on the Advertising territory. People don’t always come to read/see/listen to whatever you uploaded, so you may have to go where people are and let them know. The way to give yourself some spin here is by putting the most basic estimate on your time and effort. And, of course, strategic thinking paired with some humanly possible flexibility is instrumental for success.

Social Media Actually BBC Presentation

View more presentations from Julia S.

Social Networking: How Russians Took Over the Internet

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Early in the 20th c., in the wake of the Soviet State, one Russian poet proclaimed: “I’d learn Russian if only because it was spoken by Lenin“. Click through to the first decade of the 21st c., and, looking at the data from comScore, the quote should now be: “I’d learn Russian if only because it’s spoken by the Social Networks users“.
Russia has come atop of 20 countries, leaving U.S. and the UK far
behind, on the list of country audiences most engaged in Social
Networking. An average Russian visitor spends 6.6 hours to view 1,307
pages in a month. As TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters correctly remarks, the data is somewhat flawed
by the fact that comScore did not report traffic from public computers
and mobile phones. This means that the actual figure may even be higher.

Russia and Brazil are the most engaged countries on the Social Web

The reason why this data represents such interest is simple: be it
Russia, Brazil, or the United States, these are large multinational
countries spread across vast terrains. Social Networks, like vKontakte
(Russia), Orkut (Brazil), and Facebook (U.S.), help to connect citizens
who live or travel in different corners of the countries, as well as
expats who live elsewhere in the world. These high rates of engagement also provide an opportunity for marketers, says Mark Read, SVP and managing director of comScore Europe:

“The highly engaged behavior of social networkers in Russia offers significant opportunity for marketers and advertisers seeking to reach these audiences“.

But to think that the Russian social networking landscape is
strikingly different is to understimate the developments in Russian
culture before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. At the time
(late 1990s) when Yuri Milner who is now one of Facebook investors decided to partake in the development of the Russian Internet, Yandex,
then the Russian equivalent of Yahoo!, was already around. These days
Yandex appears to bridge the gap between Yahoo! and Google, offering
many equivalents of Google services (those who ever worked with Yandex! Direct will agree that it closely follows Google AdWords). Yandex’s longest rival is Rambler that also owns the advertising platform, Begun.
There are Russian equivalents of Flickr, Delicious, and YouTube, while
Twitter increasingly sees Russian-language “tweets” and has its very
own group in vKontakte. In fact, I discovered FriendFeed earlier this
year via a Russian acquaintance – long before Robert Scobles began to
evangelise about it.

So, the language is not a problem: English has always been spoken to
a various degree by people in Russia, therefore following the “Western”
developments to apply them to the Russian audience and market isn’t a
problem. Likewise, as foreign marketers recognise, with Russian users
being so active online, there is a solid investment and revenue
opportunity there.

What Size of a Social Network Do You Want?

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Those who are not "early adopters" have a truck of criticism against Social Media to load off. The purposes it does not serve, the dangers of using it, the "kids thing", you name it. I thought I heard it all but then Twitter happened, and once again everyone started talking about whether or not it should be used, and how.

I am not going to tell you how to use Twitter or any other of social tools (I really like the term coined by Stowe Boyd). I am going to tell you what Twitter – or rather any kind of business success attained with its help – is going to tell about your brand. 

Ever since Dell has first announced that the company is making money with coupons, everyone began to speculate "how to make money with Twitter".

What is interesting and concerning to a degree is that Dell and Zappos are among the minority of companies who managed to profit from the public chatroom that is Twitter. This rightly raises the question: can every company do this?

My answer is: if your company is not making any profit from using Twitter, the problem is either with strategy and voice, or with your brand reputation and status. Let's leave strategy and voice behind. We all know that the use of social tools should be consistent, and that the voice should be fairly conversational and non-pushy. But what about brand reputation and status?