I found this interesting article on ChrisBrogan.com discussing an analogy between social media and a phone.  Chris quotes Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, who had said that companies needed to realise that some of their customers are “dialing the social phone”, and that they better have some “operators standing by”.  The most interesting takeaway I got from Chris’ post was the emphasis on the the way we use the social phone.

Chris says “getting on the new tools and blasting out old methods will fail (is failing)”.  I can’t agree more!!  As you know I am massively into the idea of permission marketing - finding your niche that “invites” you to market to them.  Simply blasting promotional information down Twitter I don’t think is very clever.

I have a great personal story to recount where one big company has listed their address in the social phonebook but is not answering the phone.  Vodafone New Zealand is on Twitter.  I laughed when I saw them as I had just given up on a week long argument with Vodafone over my eligibility for an iPhone.  Apparently I am on a 3 year plan (I pledged my allegiance to Vodafone) and although at the time I was 17 months in the plan I was not able to switch to an iPhone plan - because this is a 2 year plan.  My argument is that I am upgrading my remaining 18 months to a further 24 month plan, paying more per month and all is good.  Vodafone view is that I am breaking my 3 year plan for a 2 year plan.

So, when I saw Vodafone come up on Twitter I asked them why I could not do this “upgrade”.  Their answer was that @vodafoneNZ was unable to answer technical questions and that I would have to address this directly with Vodafone.  Vodafones exact words were “Many questions require specialised knowledge, so the forum is the best route.  Twitter will mainly be used for announcements.”.  I noted only a day earlier Richard McManus of Read Write Web had receive similar short shrift when he had asked how come iPhone early adopters were being penalised by the introduction of cheaper data plans only a few weeks after the release of the phone.

Needless to say very few have chosen to follow Vodafone New Zealand on Twitter.  We simply do not want to be messaged at.  Social Media is not another opportunity to ram traditional marketing messages down peoples throats.  It is an opportunity for companies to engage their customers thereby creating a more loyal relationship.

P.S. I still don’t have a frigging iPhone - bring on the Android to NZ and alternative phone providers.

There is a new buzzword in the Internet - “social media”.  We used to refer to the new rich interactions on the Internet as being Web 2.0 or Social Networking, but the term social media is used as a much broader term to encompass not only the social networks like Facebook and Bebo, but also blogging, podcasts, user-generated content such as wikis, social bookmarking, micro blogging such as on Twitter and life streaming such as on Friend Feed.  In this post we examine what social media means for a marketing person - what does their role encompass in this new realm?

If we were to try and write a job description for a social media marketer it might include such terms as brand evangelist, engagement of customers, community building and even viral marketing. Clearly the role might be described as retaining your current customer base and growing it.

This makes sense if you think in terms of bottom line profit - it is much easier to make money by retaining your customer base and adding to it than it is easy to be continually rolling over your customers for new ones. A person engaged in social media marketing aims to keep their current customer happy while adding new customers.

One of the main things about social media marketing is the way in which the company message can be spread to literally hundreds and thousands of people at once. The social media web is built on patterns of friends, followers and even strangers. Bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious can take a website from backwater to prominence at rocket speed, and micro blogging sites like Twitter allow a company to communicate very quickly, whether it be through responding to a complaint or launching a new product. Customers are able to follow and track the companies message in real time.

Social media is here to stay - case in point the likes of Google looking at buying Digg for US$200 million, the rapid rise of Twitter and the even faster growth of life streaming site Friend Feed. Customers almost automatically go online to interact with their chosen companies. Companies that simply ignore the social media and blogosphere risk large public relations blowups outside of their company and lost bottom line profits as their community of customers move on to companies that talk their social language.

The role of social media in a marketers role is absolutely imperative. Building communities within your customers, reaching out to new customers, building much stronger customer business relationships are keystone foundations of social media and equally should be fundamental goals of any successful business. It is essential that you are part of the sharing of thoughts and complaints of your customers and not simply an naive bystander.

In a recent post I introduced the new blogs we have recently developed for Base Backpackers and the Calypso and NJoy hostels in Cairns.  I was just in Cairns this last week and I introduced Brad and Brett to Twitter and Friend Feed - they didn’t get it!  All this got me thinking, is the fact that these businesses are finally picking up on the blog mean that the cutting edge marketability of these mediums is all over; that quite simply they are too late.  Has blogging become so mainstream that it is now passe?

Blogs have been the darling of the Web 2.0 era; companies and individuals have expounded their thoughts and relationships around discussions have been formed. Many refer to the blog phenomenon as the democratisation of the Internet; in which everyone can be a publisher. This blog alone has over 1,000 subscribers and many more daily visitors. Blogs also provide unbeatable food for search engine - their continual fresh content and interlinking nature of the blogosphere rocketing well populated blogs up search engine results pages. In one year alone this blog has achieved a Page Rank of 6 with no Search Engine Optimistation or marketing effort on our part at all. So what is the problem?

Information overload! I tried to introduce Google Reader to the Backpacking Queensland Committee as a way of being able to consume more information faster. But do we really want more information? More stuff to read? Blogs such as this actually entail quite a commitment from our readers to take the time and energy to read the posts, and with so much information people are simply not reading the Internet like they use to. Instead they skim read, scanning the text and moving on. For a blogger, maintaining readers and growing new ones becomes increasingly hard in a sea of noise.

Step up to the plate life streaming. Life streaming is potentially the new blog - the darling of social media (see my post earlier regarding the new buzz term “social media”. Life streaming entails a chronologically-ordered collection of information from many sites. A lifestream will often include collections of shorter random thoughts (or micro blogs), photos, videos, cut and paste from emails, links, and generally anything worth (or even not worth) sharing. Lifestreams are inherently simple - they are short and sweet - yet they can provide as much information as the personal blog does. A quick text to the site, a video or photo, or a shared link.

The most well-known life streaming site is the social aggregation service Friend Feed. Enter your details for any number of 43 services from your blog, your RSS feed reader, You Tube, Flickr and Twitter and Friend Feed collects and aggregates your data. Link and follow friends and create groups around your lifestream. The similarities to a blog are obvious, yet much more fluid and dynamic, comments are relabelled discussions, profiles are pulled from a variety of other social media (Facebook or Bebo for example) and instead of a blog post there is a “stream” of thoughts. More importantly however the friends and followers of the lifestream are highlighted by their participation as opposed to their thoughts and opinions.

In the recent, say 24 months, the blog has been the primary online way to communicate with your friends, customers and potential customers. Regular posts of thoughts, news and opinion; commenting and trackbacks; and recognition of one another through “blogrolls” have created niche communities on the web around specific topics. But with information overload and time sensitivities new faster social media services are providing a faster more efficient way to continually communicate with each other. Think of them as real-time live blogging!

Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter allow the publisher to record and share every quick thought or link while quickly seeing those you follow too. It is easy to join the global conversation or create your own conversational community among friends. What’s more, your thoughts are restricted to 160 characters - a far swathe of information you are bombarded with on blogs such as this. One of the important points about sites such as Twitter is that it is the add on services that make these sites so user friendly and popular - I can text, email, instant message, setup an automates stream from iTunes, RSS feed and ping my Twitter account endlessly keeping those that are interested permanently informed.

On the social aggregating sites such as Friend Feed conversations very quickly spring up as ever item that is streamed can be commented on, leading to faster, deeper, almost offline conversations about everything. The result is much more participation on the web - in fact, more so than the blog where apart from the more techy, most remained happy to stand on the sides, reading and consuming without participating. Life streaming is encouraging more participation on the social web than ever before.

So is it the death of blogging? Probably not immediately - lifestreams seem to be encompassing those more interested in socialising that actively generating opinion and conversation - but therein may lie the secret; if you are in an industry such as hostelling that promotes socialisation, meeting people, sharing experiences and word of mouth perhaps you are too late in setting up a blog; lifestreams are the new blogs!