Just a quick post before we creep into 2010. On the 25th of December Christmas Tweets – our twitter visualiser http://www.christmastweets.co.uk/ – achieved the accolade of site of the day on the FWA http://www.thefwa.com. What I love about it is it’s not worthy, it’s a great use of twitter, it looks great and it’s fun. The competition is fierce on the FWA so well done to everyone involved.
Our Head of Social Media, Rachel Clarke, was asked to write a piece for the Guardian about keeping blogging honest last week.
You can read what Rachel has to say about best practice for blogger endorsement here.
It would seem as though it’s all about transparency. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that I wasn’t going to blog about this to start with. But then Rachel gave me a new iphone and £100 and I changed my mind. Funny that.
Media Square, the parent company of twentysix ran a Social Media Seminar the other week. One of the items produced was a lovely little glossary of terms, where you can find out all sorts of things like:
Anonoblog: A blog site authored by a person or persons who don’t publish
their name.
SMO: Acronym for Social Media Optimisation, a term coined by Rohit Bhargava
Troll: Someone who writes inflammatory comments and posts on sites with the sole purpose of creating disharmony and argument. Do Not Feed the Trolls.
Vlogs: A form of blogging using video
Widget: A stand-alone application you can embed in other applications, like
a website or a desktop, or view on its own on a PDA.
We’re holding a social medial seminar tonight. From twentysix we’ve got Rachel Clarke, Head of Social Media, giving a presentation with lots of nice pictures and a couple of good graphs. She’ll be joined by some of the guys from Cadbury, Google and Carphone Warehouse talking about how their brands are using all that good social media stuff. It should be cool. Watch this space and we’ll tell you all about it.
I’m a massive sucker for graphs, infothetics and that sort of stuff and recently saw the above on the excellent Information is Beautiful blog. What do you think?
At first I was pretty surprised at the big split between the number of female and male twitterers (the only females that follow me on Twitter want me to take a look at their “XXXHOT pics”). But with Facebook the divide is even more pronounced – last month Inside Facebook reported that, in the US, the female/male ratio on the site has now hit an all time high, with ladies outnumbering blokes 1.35 to 1, with twice as many women joining Facebook in the last month than men.
I wonder why? Is it because fewer men have access to a computer at their place of work? Or are women just more social than men?
Twentysix is a digital and social media agency, so we have to have a blog, don’t we? And a Twitter stream, a Facebook account, a Friendfeed account, videos on YouTube and all of the latest fads of social media.
No. We don’t.
What we need is what is right for us, what is right for the people and culture, for what we want to say, for what we can say. We should focus our efforts on where it matters. That is often something that is forgotten, that it’s not about whatever is hot now, but about where it makes sense for a brand to be.
So Ad Age’s screed against agencies that aren’t on Twitter is wrong. It went through a number of agency twitter accounts and decided that most of them are not very good at it. It complains when they have the name but put nothing on there, it complains when they have the name but the content is too much sales or too personal. It complains about followers, or lack of them.
The irony is that the same people clients hire to erect communications and social-media strategies often appear uncomfortable using Twitter themselves.
Reading through the comments, there’s a lot of backlash against the publications attitude.
At Ogilvy, we put our effort into being out there across social media as ourselves, not behind a corporate account. That’s what social media is all about – not the corporate handle (which serves a purpose yet a small one in comparison to all of us Ogilvy People being active in social media.
At my company (Campfire) we see Twitter as a gathering place for individuals to share ideas and experiences. It’s probably inappropriate for a company or brand to have a Twitter account. Much better for individuals at the company, even the CEO, to speak up via an individual voice.
TwentysixLondon has a Twitter feed. There’s 2 of us writing it although it pulls info from the rest of the agency. Twentysix Social Media also has an account, but it’s not been used at the moment, we just own it, focusing our efforts in one place. But we also have lots of personal accounts (not that hard to find) across the company, we use the tools for everyday life, not just for marketing ourselves. We’ve got successful blogs and are active across the net.
When it comes to the corporate stuff, the first step is knowing WHAT is needed and WHY? We think we’ve got the balance right at the moment; no doubt it will change, but for now, we’re happy.
