Twitter + the media = the beginning of the end?

“If the mainstream media are unable to address news stories that are freely available elsewhere, we will look increasingly irrelevant”

Paul Dacre, Mail Editor at the Leveson Inquiry

This week, the FA sacked their manager Fabio Capello. Pretty big news.

And, when browsing some of the coverage, I was suddenly struck by the role that Twitter played in the reporting of the story. It was as though every article or news broadcast pulled in comments that someone football-related had made on Twitter upon hearing the resignation.

I know this is nothing new, the number of news articles that are almost entirely based on a tweet is soaring by the day. It’s a fascinating change to the status quo.

In the pre-Twitter days, journalists would get comments directly from sources and they would then reveal these comments to their audiences through articles or VTs.

Today, these comments are made directly to the public with the ‘celebrity’ in question often having a audience of tens of thousands themselves. The traditional media are therefore left to report on the tweet itself, even though many readers might have already already seen it.

It’s not hard to see how this marginalises traditional media.

And again, yes, none of this is new.

Twitter – the enemy or the solution?

But it is perhaps more interesting in light of some of the leaks this week from Sky and the BBC concerning the way their journalists use social services like Twitter.

Now, despite the extent of the fascist enforcement you believe these two media corporations are engaging in, these reports seems to be pretty telling.

There is not but a little irony hidden away here. For these are not easy times for traditional media outlets. Journalists with swathes of Twitter followers and enthusiastic communities can be a massive benefit. But it is not hard to see how the money-people and those who live and breathe on page views might think differently.

For those of us that work in PR, this dichotomy is nothing new. It’s perfectly conceivable now for a brand to have a bigger social community that the journalists that it has sought to influence over the last however-many-years.

And that’s a pretty liberating possibility.

I’m off to an event tomorrow at Social Media Week London entitled “Twitter, the Butterfly Effect and the Future of Journalism” and I’m sure it will touch on some of these themes.

It’s a tough time for traditional media. But I can’t help thinking that laying down rules isn’t necessarily the answer. The status quo won’t work IMHO.

picture credit

Brainstorming: can you force creativity?

Brainstorming. Anyone that has worked in marketing will be familiar with the concept. You get a ton of people in a room and get them to try and be creative for an hour or so to come up with ‘ideas’. I’ve even been on ‘brainstorming training’ where tips and tricks for better brainstorming are unveiled.

I have to admit that it is a process that never seems particularly effective. Can you really force creative processes?

So an article on C.Design by Cliff Kuang entitled “The Brainstorming Process Is B.S. But Can We Rework It?” really stood out (via Gill), especially as I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about the ‘creative process’ recently.

It is worth reading the full thing but here are my key takeaways:

1. You are more creative working alone

Writing in the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer talks about an “experiment, conducted in the 1950s, which found that when test subjects tried to solve a complex puzzle, they actually came up with twice as many ideas working alone as they did when working in a group. Numerous studies have since verified that finding: Putting people into big groups doesn’t actually increase the flow of ideas. Group dynamics themselves–rather than overt criticism–work to stifle each person’s potential.”

And author Susan Cain agrees:

People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”

2. There is such a thing as a bad idea

Another key strand of the article casts doubt on this commonly quoted phrase:

Lehrer goes on to point out that other studies have shown that the presence of criticism actually increases the flow of ideas. One experiment compared two groups: One which brainstormed with a mandate not to criticize, and another which had the license to debate each others ideas. The second group had 20% more ideas–and even after the session ended, the people in the second group had far more additional ideas than those in the first.

3. Creativity inspired by others

Kuang also quotes Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, who ran an experiment on Broadway that found the worst-performing productions were the work of two groups:

  1. those that had worked together too much
  2. those that had worked together too little

“Too much familiarity bred groupthink. Too little meant that they didn’t have enough chemistry to challenge each other. The most productive groups were those with a baseline of familiarity but just enough fresh blood to make things interesting.”

That idea of ideas being sparked by other people and your circumstances is similar to the Adjacent Possible concept I’ve blogged about previously. And Kuang moves on to discuss how workplaces can increasingly be designed to help breed creativity in the workplace - the aim being that employees are encouraged to meet and interact with those they might not normally work with.

One size?

All this makes me wonder whether brainstorming really is the most effective way to create and the most efficient way to come up with ideas. I believe that everyone is creative but is creative in different ways. A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works.

The Adjacent Possible

After reading this blog post by Jed, I came across a great little concept called the adjacent possible.

It’s a term used by writer Steven Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas Come From (which I haven’t read but is now on my Amazon wishlist. I have read his previous book – Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, which is great).

In a Wall Street Journal piece, in which Johnson explains the concept, he reveals how ‘good ideas’ are:

“inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”

As Jed explains, the phrase wasn’t coined by Johnson but by the scientist Stuart Kauffman to describe this very idea. As Johnson states, the adjacent possible:

“…captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

To crystalise this concept in a phrase, Johnson states that the adjacent possible is the “premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas”.

To PR, business and beyond…

This phrase particularly struck me as I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about creativity/inspiration, the role it plays for us generally and in the work we do in business (and for me personally in business, marketing and PR). As a professionally trained musician (in a previous life) I’ve always thought of myself as quite a creative person and yet often I find that, in the routine of the day-to-day, it is easy to lose sight of the need for and importance of being creative and innovative. And, if we pull that firmly back to business, it seems amazing that so many businesses fall into a rut of ‘this is how things have always been and always will do’ and seem afraid to innovate and try new things.

It is why I love working with startup/disruptive companies. Companies that are not afraid to try to do things differently. It doesn’t always work but, when it does, the results can be phenomenal.

And I guess I have a toying feeling that the PR industry suffers from this inability to innovate and be creative too. It is easy in PR to get tied up in the routine, in the day-to-day or traditional ways of doing things. Whereas other marketing disciplines such as advertising bet a great deal of money, resource and reputation on creativity and ideas, the same just often doesn’t happen as much in PR.

[And as aside I must just say that I'm not just talking about billion dollar ad campaigns and/or wacky stunts. I mean creativity and innovation in its broadest sense - creating something new and original.]

A means to an end

So, to bring this back full circle, if you buy into the idea of the adjacent possible, you see that it is only by opening ourselves up to ideas, innovations and developments that we too can be creative and innovative ourselves.

That means sharing ideas and being inspired by the work of others. Even taking concepts from elsewhere and adapting them to be used in other ways.

So in business, as Johnson states, the idea of closely protecting your innovations and developments is perhaps not the most fruitful way to secure further innovation.

And in PR and marketing, being open to and learning new technologies, ideas, ways of working can and should inspire.

Finally, in a wider context this is all just a realisation that, as humans, we learn best from others and from external influences. Like magpies, we acquire and reuse ideas, techniques and technologies to create and develop new things and new ways of thinking about things.

So rather than sitting around searching for that elusive ‘big idea’ in splendid isolation, we should be opening our minds to other ideas and influences as a way to create and innovate ourselves.

Why all PRs should learn to code

It’s a New Year and, to celebrate, I’ve got a new blog template! In fact it’s a template that I’ve spent a few weeks over Christmas putting together. It is the first time I’ve created a WordPress template from scratch and it was actually pretty straightforward.

I’ve played around with website coding since I was pretty young and even built a (albeit primitive) website when still in my early teens.

Learn to code in 2012

So I was interested today to see numerous tweets doing the rounds encouraging followers to learn how to code in 2012. The initiative is being launched by Codecademy – a code-teaching website – and encourages anyone to sign-up to a yearly course that will deliver a weekly email with a different module. The idea is that, in time, you’ll be building your own apps and websites.

It’s a good PR campaign for the website and, if the tweets in my feed were anything to go by today, is getting some good viral traction. A counter on the website shows that 98,014 have signed up so far – good data capture return if nothing else!

Coding PRs?

I sent this round the office today with a note saying that I think PRs of the future (and arguably today) would benefit from knowing how to code. I’m not saying they’ll need to be able to build a website or application, but having an even basic knowledge of the main web languages certainly helps me on a daily basis and I’m sure would help others too.

In addition I think that, generally in the future, those with a wide range of skills will be far more employable, especially in the PR industry (a post for another day). And this is also pertinent at a time when jobs in the PR industry are more sought after than ever. Digital skills are becoming commonplace amongst graduates (something that was really brought home to me recently) and, increasingly, expected by employers.

So what are you waiting for….

Celebrating contrarianism

“Only division can cause progress” – Christopher Hitchens

I’ve admired Christopher Hitchens for some time so was very sad to hear of his death last week from cancer. While he probably inspired and appalled people in equal measure I was constantly intrigued by his position on issues that often set out a radically different outlook to the publicly accepted ‘norm’.

Many have argued that this is a celebration of free speech and the ability for anyone to say anything in the countries in which he lived. It is.

But I think it goes a step further too. Free speech is all well and good, but I firmly believe a tolerant society needs people like Christopher Hitchens who take advantage of free speech to offer viewpoints that upset the apple cart and make us think.

It’s the same reason why I think it is important to have outspoken people like Nick Griffin. In a startlingly honest and moving interview between Hitchens and Jeremy Paxman broadcast some time ago but repeated on Sunday (available temporarily here), Hitchens says the above quote. And it really resonates.

It is only when we are challenged that we fully realise how we truly feel. It is when we are confronted by something that we have previously accepted wholeheartedly that we are able to either confirm current beliefs or begin to accept a new way of looking at the world.

A contrarian viewpoint is frequently scary. But it is fundamentally important.

The future PROs are digital natives

As part of my involvement with the PRCA I was invited to give a seminar today at the University of Westminster to students on its PR Masters course.

This is part of a link up between the PRCA and 12 Universities throughout the country. I’ve often wondered whether PR courses at higher education need to have more input from the industry so that students have a clear idea about what working in PR actually feels like and this initiative seems to me to be a fantastic step in this direction.

My slides from the session are below, but might not make too much sense without my accompanying ramblings! The main thrust of what I was saying was that digital PR offers professionals exciting new opportunities to reach audiences and also measure and evaluate what it is that we do for the brands we work for.

Chatting to the lecturers afterwards it was interesting to learn that PR students seem to be very open to using social media in the campaign ideas they put together as part of their course. What they apparently find more difficult is putting the use of social and digital in a more strategic setting and also how to integrate traditional media as well. At a time when many in the industry seem to be struggling with the adoption of social media and digital, I thought this was a fascinating observation and one that bodes well for the future of the industry.

These guys are right at home with social media and it was encouraging to see them using a range of online tools such as Klout and Google Analytics already.

Digital PR – A presentation at Westminster University

PR’s crisis of confidence as it looks to define itself (again)

This was originally published over at Econsultancy where there is a good discussion in the comments and a response from the PRSA.

There’s nothing more predictable than the PR industry’s constant urge to ‘define itself’. So today, true to form, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has announced that it is to develop a new ‘modern definition’ of PR (again). Following attempts in 2003 and 2007, this time, there’s a microsite, a piece in the New York Times and even a crowd-sourcing initiative.

Why do we need to define PR? It’s a great question; the last time the PRSA tried to find a new definition was four years ago. PRSA CEO Rosanna Fiske laments that it is hard for her to explain to her mum what she does. Will a definition really help here? This is the current one:

“Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.”

However, if you can’t explain to your mum what a PR does, then the issue seems to me to be wider than merely an industry definition.

The fundamentals of this run far deeper. Our constant need to redefine what it is we do could be seen as an indication of the fast-moving digital world we find ourselves in. And it would be hard to argue against this. But is it really necessary? Does it happen in other industries? In other marketing sectors?

I think there is something else at work here: fear. There is immense fear in the PR industry about what it actually means to do PR these days. The reason I was drawn to PR in the first place was because of the interesting position the industry finds itself in. There are so many drivers that make this an incredibly rich sector to be working in, from the democratisation of media to the socalisation of the web. But fear still pervades. And I am constantly frustrated by how slow sections of the industry are to reinvent themselves.

Maybe that is the problem with trying to find a definition because, apart from a few good agencies and practitioners doing great, pioneering work, there is too much burying of heads in the sand and hoping that the ‘same old’ will continue to be enough.

It won’t be.

The ironic thing is that the fundamentals of PR haven’t really changed – building relationships with publics is as relevant now as it has always been. Yes, some of the tactics may have changed and strategies may have shifted, but the fundamentals are the same. So changing the definition just feels like papering over the cracks.

In light of the recent furore about the role of professional bodies in the industry, then maybe we should welcome this development as a chance to raise the debate around what it is that PR is all about.

I’m just not sure whether sitting around debating high level definitions is the thing that is going to transform the industry and its reputation.

Occupy: a triumph for a belief in a cause

I walked past the Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral last Monday for the first time. It’s probably just as well I did as the camp has been served eviction notices and soon will likely suffer the same terminal conclusion as its sister protest in New York.

But despite the bumbling right wing propaganda spouted by Boris Johnson last week, the abiding thing that struck me as I walked past the tents was respect for those that believe in a cause so much that they will resort to taking action. Because the fact remains that, despite your politics and whether you agree or disagree with the arguments, the protest has raised a global debate. The largely peaceful demonstrations have brought to the fore an argument that, since the global economic crisis started, has been largely ignored by our politicians and the mainstream media.

Boris’s rhetoric and Bloomberg’s violence has so far been able to quel the column inches this debate has generated. The challenge for the protesters now will be two-fold. Firstly, to continue the debate now that the camps have gone and, secondly, to try and bring about long-term change.

What Occupy challenges us to do is reassess the flavour of capitalism that we think is right and proper. I don’t see this as an anti-capitalist argument, but a question about how we should operate as a capitalist society. That means deciding whether we should take action to ensure fat bankers and immoral rulers are unable to get fatter and more immoral anytime soon.

And, talking of immoral rulers, it is not just capitalism that is under the spotlight but democracy itself, with technocrats talking over across Europe as Peter Beaumont highlights today.

2011 could be a defining year. The year when large swathes of public backlash took rulers and politicians by surprise both in the spring and the autumn.

For us in the western world, it is a time to celebrate our right to freedom of speech and our ability to start a debate that flies in the face of what those in power want us to think.

Power of One Live Blog – #P1event

I’m at the Battersea Power Station today for the Power of One event.

It’s a conference focused on how the individual can achieve in the technology industry.

There is a whoppingly impressive lineup of speakers from Jason Calacanis to Charles Arthur discussing everything related to technology and start up companies. If I miss quote you, please let me know!

The event was sponsored by Telefonica, so credit to them.

I’ll be updating this page throughout the day with the best bits. Hit F5!

Morten Lund - How I survived the European tech start up world, lessons learned

Disclosure: Morten is chairman of Tradeshift (an EML Wildfire client)

  • Be very careful about seeking capital. You can only really understand it if you do it yourself and there is no formula.
  • I love sales and people with stamina!
  • Made 50m EUROS so was loaded but bored. And then I fucked up and went bankrupt! It was scary. I saw how amazingly nice people can be.
  • Now I just focus. Focus on two companies.
  • Love marketing – I made this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP_vLqc9fnU
  • It’s simple, not easy.
  • Everyone should have done Dropbox, but no one did. If you don’t spend your investment on your prototype, you’re stupid.
  • Networking – people need to know you are in the game.
  • What is the next big thing? We don’t have a fucking clue.
  • You have to have no fear of losing. Starbucks lost $60m on Living.com.
  • Money matters less. People is everything.
  • There is a fine line between vision and hallucination.
  • All the odds are against you. Be speedy, be fast and be original.
  • Good people can succeed with a bad idea, bad people can’t succeed with a good idea.
  • If you pay in bananas, you get monkeys.

VC Panel chaired by Elizabeth Varley

Investing in companies that embody the Power of One – Jason Calacanis, Gonzalo Martin-Villa, Carlos Eduardo, Tyler Crowley

Here are the Twitter links for the panel – @evarley @Jason @steepdecline @delossantos_h @ceduardo

  • Do you need a lot of money or people to create something game-changing?
  • JC – depends on the product. For bio-tech you do. For internet startups it is possible for a few people to create something great with no funding.
  • TC – This question wouldn’t have been asked 10 years ago. In 10 years the question might be should you take VC money.
  • JC – when intelligent people invest in a company, you also get their attention. You get their input. It’s not the money, it is the attention on your business. These people are playing for pride, they are playing for the win.
  • TC – the question in music 10 years ago was can you make an album without a record label and, today, that is reality.
  • What is the optimal number of founders? Some VCs won’t invest in one-founder startups
  • CE – often we’ve seen the quicker a startup has a bigger team, the quicker they can kick off. They stop drinking the cool aid.
  • Do you invest in a person as much as you invest in a product?
  • CE – yes, often. It’s often a combination of the two though.
  • JC – typically with an entrepreneur either a light will shine on them or it won’t. It’s hard to say it is any one thing. If I had to pick a relentless entrepreneur with a glow in a tough, unattractive market than the other way round. As an investor if you know ‘that person is going to be successful with or without me’ then that is very attractive. When someone says ‘seven year projection’ I walk out the room. Why would I read your business plan? Show me your product.
  • JC – there are two buckets – people that create and people that talk about creating

Richard Kramer - When Finance Meets Tech: Not a Pretty Picture!

  • Former analyst and investment banker
  • See 200 tech companies a month – try and help investors see through the crap
  • Tech IPOs from the first half of 2010 really haven’t done very well. IPOs are not all they are shaped up to be.
  • The device market is the only growth area in the tech industry at the moment
  • The amount of money we spend on phones is rising quickly
  • There is way to much focus in this industry on the US and Europe – check out Asia
  • “Apple is God but we need a Chinese God” - quote from Chinese manufacturer
  • App stores are content stores
  • [These 70s slides need to be seen to be believed!]
  • Big opportunity in emerging markets for tablets to really be successful
  • A tablet is a big phone, a TV is a big tablet – apps need to be cross platform
  • Apple makes all its money by marking up flash – the higher spec iPhones/iPads are a cash cow. The same with iPad ‘smart covers’. Apple have a retail channel that makes it millions.
  • Samsung has the industry’s biggest advertising budget. Samsung makes money in a different way to Apple. Samsung Telecom is a distribution model for its memory and display products.
  • HTC have made $1/2bn of acquisitions in the last year. They are the only ones that have innovated on top of Android.
  • Nokia and RIM: the difficulty in this industry is execution and that is the problem these face. But they are still profitable so can get back in the game. But they need to change their lack of internet innovation.
  • Google has had colossal failures but it is big enough that it can just wipe them off. They should use Motorola to prototype new features.
  • Mobile payment – going to be very difficult to make money on it
  • Mobile advertising – even Google isn’t sure how much they are actually going to make on mobile advertising
  • Telco marketing is stale – based on device and price – nothing else. No innovation.
  • What’s unique about the customer experience with operators? Nothing. What about letting people change phone every 6 months?
  • Start with a community and the needs of that community.
  • A billion smartphones in 2013 and all will be co-branded with an internet company with deep integration [I guess Twitter is doing this with Apple now]

Stuart Arnott – The Power of One Pitch

  • The problem – I’m better connected to people I lost touch with over the years than the people I really care about
  • Started using digital photo frames to send photos in real-time. Connected to picture feeds with captions and linked to a calendar. You can include apps including weather and Facebook etc.
  • A way of staying in touch with people that live on their own or who are ill or infirm
  • www.mindings.com

Yosi Taguri - Launching a Mad idea – lessons from the Pah! iPhone app

  • “When I started my first company I fucked up!”
  • [This guy has plenty of energy!]
  • Talking about he was messed around by WPP and Google from an investment standpoint
  • Hard to live blog this, but he’s sharing lots of videos of people playing the Pah game
  • 1.5m YouTube views led to 2.5m game plays
  • Their measure of success? The number of shouts of Pah! 63m shouts! (they also made $60,000). Now they have made $250,000 developing similar apps for others
  • What did I learn from all this? If you make cool things, people will buy it. China has the biggest piracy but they also generate the most money from downloads. get the pricing structure right.
  • “If you have an idea and you are not doing it, you are stupid and ugly!”

Media panel with Charles Arthur - The shift to the Power of One – Stuart Dredge, Ewan McLoed, Tim Green

  • CA – everything these days is the media’s fault! Why does the media write about things? Why does it write about things?
  • How do you decide what to write about?
  • SD – I spend a long time trying to find the interesting stuff from all the other stuff out there
  • What makes something interesting?
  • SD – often it is a gut feel – it just stands out. It seems new, interesting, entertaining
  • TG – it is impossible to write about everything. So we have to focus on things that do things differently
  • EM – use my first name, read my site, check what I’m writing about
  • CA – It’s not about are you a big company, it’s more about if what you trying to do is different or interesting
  • SD – There is a lot of bullshit at the moment. Often it is the low key pitches that are the best – don’t over PR it
  • CA – first it was “we’ve got a website” that was news, then it was “we’ve got VC funding” that was news but then it stops being new
  • CA – often more sceptical if a company is making lots of noise, professional PR
  • CA – how important actually is journalism? Angry Birds wasn’t successful because it got lots of good press
  • What do you write about?
  • SD – it’s got to be about the readers. At the moment more readers have iPhones than Android but that will change in the next year
  • TG – it’s a self selecting audience as well as selective journalists
  • Is the future HTML5?
  • TG – a lot of this is about distribution. Better to go straight to the source, so web apps are clearly going to be important. The other angle to look at is perception and reality but how many apps do we all actually use on a regular basis?
  • EM – if you require high performance – games etc. – then clearly you need native apps but for everything else, HTML5 is the future. I think we’ll see 95-99% web app.
  • SD – as a consumer I don’t really care – I’ll go for what I want/need where I can get it and if it works then that’s all that matters. How you pay for stuff is interesting too with Facebook Credits now coming to the web.

David McCandless - Trends in tech start ups, the data you need to see

  • Title of presentation is ‘information is beautiful‘
  • Billions and trillions – it is impossible to get your head around them – made a visualisation
  • Do horoscopes all just say the same thing?
  • The story is often the journey through the data – this is data journalism
  • Never been to design school and have never been trained – only been designing very recently – had an innate design sense which was absorbed by working through media
  • We are all visualisers – we all expect data to be visual these days. Our eyes are always looking for patterns – it is the language of the eye combined with the language of the mind.
  • Who is suing whom in telecoms
  • Visualisations and infographics are a new kind of camera – Racist Profiling
  • David has a book of his infographics - http://www.davidmccandless.com/books/
  • Snake Oil visualisation app
  • Spend time curating your data and it becomes an asset

Sam Ramji - API’s are The Power of One companies secret weapon – @sramji

UPDATE – slides are here

  • Think about Darwin’s Finches and evolution
  • In the past business went from direct to indirect and the web is going through the same, that is why APIs are important
  • For successful companies 80% of traffic will come from beyond the browser, in a few years it will be 100%
  • Everyone has to play in the world the winners make – the 80:20 rule
  • In the world of APIs, the 80:20 rules often becomes to 99:1
  • Current environmental pressures – social, mobile and cloud – they can all come together
  • You can’t build new Facebooks or Twitters but you need to access them through APIs
  • Change agency – what is so damn wrong with the current model? I like it and I understand it – people fear the unknown
  • You need to be as close as possible to the problem you are trying to solve
  • Software is eating the world – Marc Andreessen
  • Bake your business model into your API

Jason Calacanis - Start your own tech business, you need attitude

This should be interesting. I’ve always had a bit love/hate with him but, whatever he is, he’s always engaging!

  • We live in fascinating times
  • He is a technological optimist – everything can be solved by technology
  • e.g. turning roads into solar panels to solve energy problems
  • The feature film Forks Over Knives examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled
  • The China Study details the connection between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes and cancer
  • There are more prescriptions for depression in the US as there are people
  • [He insists all this is coming back to tech and startups!]
  • Being an entrepreneur is painful and it is going to be depressing. You get through that depression by focusing on the end goal and getting excited [a good angel investor is really a therapist!]
  • Jason’s new book is called “A broken clock is right twice a day”
  • If your chance of winning is one in ten, have ten startups!
  • Key rule = create, don’t wait
  • Don’t worry if its not perfect, iterate
  • Ten years ago the cost of setting up a web startup was huge, now it isn’t – think what existed ten years ago
  • What do winners do? Stick with it and survive
  • We are the last generation that will remember when the internet didn’t exist
  • The problem with startups is too many people aren’t sticking with it - Steve Jobs quote to end the session

If you’re going to use social media, make sure you use it to be social!

As you may have picked up already today, we have released our second report investigating how some of the UK’s leading technology companies are using social media. You can download it here.

For the second year in a row, we found that UK technology companies are missing out on the potential of social media by not being social and failing to use these new channels to engage with their audiences.

Only 31% of brands with a Facebook account used it to engage with users and, of those that used Twitter, only 14% of tweets were replies and retweets. When it came to the companies that had a blog, only 20% received comments and only one company took the trouble to reply to comments received.

In the study, we took the 2010 Deloitte Fast Tech 50 – a list of the UK’s 50 fastest growing technology companies and benchmarked their social media activity.

Facebook for B2B is on the rise

One of the most interesting findings this year was that the use of Facebook amongst B2B companies has skyrocketed in the last 12 months with 70% of B2B companies on the platform compared to just 40% previously. Linkedin was still the most popular network used overall (92%), followed by Twitter (80%). YouTube remained the least popular for the second year running (44%). Despite the increase in adoption, most companies were still only using these channels for ‘push’ marketing techniques with 65% of companies with a Facebook page using it for one way communications and 96% of blogs simply broadcasting article and news content without inviting responses.

B2B v B2C

As might be expected, B2C brands in the study were far more likely to engage with users than B2B companies. Of the B2C companies with a Facebook page, 63% used it to engage with consumers compared to just 22% of B2B companies. And, while the percentage of B2B tweets that were replies was only 7%, B2C rated much higher (35%).

Tech companies were also still failing to effectively integrate social media channels with their website. Only 58% of companies in the study had social media links on their homepage despite over 90% of companies having at least one social media site. Half of companies linked Twitter from their homepage, but only 14% linked to a YouTube page or blog.

It’s no longer whether you use it, it’s how you use it

This matches what we’ve found in the last year when speaking to tech companies about social media PR. Whereas a few years ago much of the conversation was about whether tech brands should be using social media. These days, most companies know that they have to get in on the social media act, but are still unsure how to go about it. I predict we’ll see further maturing over the next year, so when version three of the report comes along, maybe we’ll finally see companies using social to be social.

Download ‘How social are you?‘

Originally posted here.

About

This is my story. I've always been fascinated by the internet. My first passion was music and I studied a music degree at Birmingham University. But once graduated I quickly went back to the web working as a digital marketer. I also ran a web startup for a few years. In the need of a new challenge, I turned to the world of PR and now work as an Account Director at EML Wildfire. My interest is primarily looking at how PR professionals can make the most of the web and digital marketing. This blog contains my thoughts and things I find inspirational.

© 2012 Danny Whatmough - Made by me