To Follow Or Not
Posted on May 24, 2010
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I had a bit of a twitter paddy last night after using one of the Twitter analysis tools and discovering that a large number of businesses I was following weren’t following me back. I promptly un-followed them all, but I’m now having second thoughts. Ever since I joined Twitter in the height of the Obama Presidential campaign and read about how he (or rather his team) followed back everyone who followed him on Twitter – the article was holding this up as a great example of netiquette and how Team Obama ‘got’ online communications – I’ve presumed that following back was good practice for businesses on Twitter but is it?
The way I saw it was that businesses should be eager to engage and that not following back was tantamount to snubbing the tweeter who had taken the time to show an interest in your brand. I’ve just taken a little time to search through the Web to see what people are saying on the topic and the only arguments against that I can figure out are that it can lead to too much noise and that you could end up following spam or bots. With regards to the first point about excess ‘noise’, surely that’s where aggregators such as HootSuite come into play, letting you set up alerts for key words or phrases and lists where you can monitor a select number of your followers in one place. As for the second point, I can’t believe it takes more than a couple of seconds to determine from their profile pic and recent tweets whether a twitter follower is spam or not.
I can only see positives from following a tweeter who has taken the time to express an interest in your brand. It shows them you’re aware of their presence, that you care what they say (whether you do or not and whether you actually tune into what they are saying or not) and it presents an additional opportunity for getting your brand displayed – the email to say you’re following them and the display of your brand in their followers list.
I’m perhaps cutting off my nose to spite my face now and will no doubt miss out on some amazing offer from a business that I stopped following because they never followed me back – and I don’t imagine for one minute that they are mourning my absence – but I feel like if any business can go to the effort of creating a Twitter account but can’t take a few seconds a day to re-follow its followers then I’m not that bothered about hearing what they’re saying. I’d love to hear if there was another reason for businesses not automatically following its followers that I’ve missed but in the meantime if I was a business, I would re-follow my followers…probably.
East Lothian Buzz
Posted on May 20, 2010
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As part of my role in the East Lothian Council’s Economic Development team I’m on the editorial team for our quarterly Buzz magazine. The Spring/Summer issue came out today. You can read the pdf version by clicking the image below.
Link Shortening
Posted on March 9, 2010
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I’m once again blazing a trail with my social media discoveries by talking about bit.ly. Okay so short links are nothing new (in new media terms at least) and I’m not exactly an early adopter, but having jumped on the band wagon just as it’s pulling out of the station, I’ve recently started using it more and more and discovering how useful it actually is.
For those of you unfamiliar with bit.ly (or other similar’s such as tinyURL, SnipURL etc etc) it lets you shorten web links that you want to share with others. It has probably achieved a higher popularity in recent months due to applications such as Twitter that limit the number of characters you can write (140). After all when you only have 140 characters you don’t want to waste 80 of them on a web link.
But short links are much more than just convenience. What is also lets you do is track the number of clicks each short link gets. If you’re trying to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing messages then getting up to the minute statistics on the number of people clicking through to your link an be invaluable.
You can view an example of the stats it can provide at my bit.ly profile
My Social Media Stats
Posted on March 6, 2010
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It’s fair to say that in the the last few months I’ve been on a mission to embrace New/Social Media. I currently have active accounts with Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, foursquare, Feedburner and YouTube. Having made the initial first steps of establishing the accounts I thought it would be interesting to look at my current social media stats.
Facebook: 68 friends
LinkedIn: 90 conections, 18 groups, 1 recommendation
Flickr: 14 images, 14 views
Twitter: 137 followers, following 130, 226 tweets
Delicious: 26 bookmarks
foursquare: 7 nights out, 8 check-ins
YouTube: 241 channel views
What does that tell me? Not a lot, but it will be interesting to review them in a few months and compare any growth or decline. Social media is changing so quickly now that the stats could be drastically changed or could even include completely new mediums that haven’t even launched yet.
Interestingly enough the stats really don’t reveal anything interesting about the real benefit of social media, the two-way interaction that it allows you to make. I may have posted 226 tweets but the what the stats don’t tell me is what these posts led to in terms of conversations and how many of these tweets were in response to my followers tweets. I’m guessing there is something out there to analyse this so I’m off to find it.
Young Enterprise
Posted on February 28, 2010
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It’s not often I’m in the papers so I thought I would post a copy of this recent article in the East Lothian News about the Young Enterprise team from Preston Lodge High School I’m working with this year (as their Business Adviser). They recently held a successful Quiz Night to raise funds for their Yearbook and 6th Year Prom. I’m the one with my hand in my pockets looking ever the professional…
Discovering RSS Feeds
Posted on February 23, 2010
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RSS Feeds have, in the last week gone from being something I didn’t really get, to something I can’t believe I ever did without. I was aware that there were things called RSS Feeds and I had a vague idea of the type of thing they did but it wasn’t until I took the plunge and started using Google Reader that I begun to see how useful it could be. I’ve subsequently progressed to a nifty little app on my iPhone called Free RSS which is where I now store all my feeds.
For anyone reading who isn’t aware of what RSS Feeds do there is a handy guide to RSS Feeds on the BBC website but it is basically a program that allows you to store lists of your favourite websites. It will then let you know when these sites have been updated and lets you read any new articles that have been posted. It saves you from navigating to each of your favourite websites whenever you want to find new content. If you’re a regular web traveller then it really is invaluable – I can’t believe I’ve waited so long to try it out.
My current feeds include the two BBC tech bloggers dot.rory and dot.maggie, the Guardian Technology pages, top social media news website Mashable and Charlie Brooker’s Screenburn column in the Guardian. If you’ve got any suggestions for more feeds I’d like to hear them.
East Lothian Coffee Morning #2
Posted on February 19, 2010
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Due to the Glasshouse going into liquidation we had to move the 2nd ELCM to Craigielaw Golf Club who made us very welcome – although they did have a rather relaxed attitude to taking payment for the coffees!
Anyway, we had a few less people than last time – perhaps due to the location? – but I think it was a success none the less. Below is a copy of the powerpoint presentation we used to stimulate the discussion.
Geo-tag your business
Posted on February 12, 2010
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Geo-tagging, for anyone who hasn’t come across the term yet is an emerging trend that is being hailed by some as the next step in social media. It’s essentially assigning physical, geographic locations to actions, events and anything else you can think of. It’s been around for a while already in various guises you can geo-tag your images on flickr so people can see the exact location it was taken or even assign geo-tags to articles on wikipedia to identify a particular area being discussed. You can even geo-tag your business through google.
It seemed to have been in the background for a while but I’ve seen it cropping up more and more in recent weeks. If you use Twitter you may have seen people geo-tagging their tweet so you can see where they were when they are tweeting. In particular I’ve seen a service called foursquare getting mentioned a lot which is where we start to see possible applications for business.
Foursquare is being described as a location based social network. You basically ‘check-in’ wherever you go and are rewarded with points for going further and to different places. But it’s more than this, you can leave further comments too; just been to a new pub you like? Geo-tag it and leave a mini review. Tag your business and a little about what you can offer. You can then see how often foursquare users visit your business and reward them for doing so or get them to leave a geo-tag review. It’s still in the very early stages – think twitter a couple of years ago – but expect more and more ways of using foursquare and in particular geo-tagging in the future. In the meantime, it’s worth thinking how geo-tagging could be adapted to help your business.
My YouTube Channel
Posted on February 11, 2010
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Apparently on the 1st May 2007 I set up a the Al Bryce YouTube Channel. I say apparently because I don’t remember doing it and until this week I have never done anything with it but in my attempt to dominate the first page of my google search* and I thought it would be worth taking a look at. Annoyingly the ‘albryce’ username must have been taken already as it’s registered as ‘albryce303′ (303 was the number of my first flat) but I started to populate the channel with a few videos I have come across in recent months and will see if it takes me anywhere.
*where I Google my own name and to date have 8 out of the top 10 listings, including the top 6 – yes it is a sad thing to do, I know.
Wrath of an (ex) Dragon
Posted on January 26, 2010
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Ex-Dragon Doug Richards has published a manifesto calling on entrepreneurs to lead the country out of recession. While I agree with a lot of what he says, I need to (perhaps with more than a little bias) take issue with some of what he says. In particular:
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“We must sweep clean the entire Government funded industry of business suport…” There is, I believe, a fantastic support system in place for start-up businesses (in Scotland certainly). The issue as I see it, is a gap in the system which means businesses who want to take the next step (from £100,000TO to £1,000,000TO) These are the companies who create the employment and wealth that will help to kick-start the recovery. Address the system to support these companies and you will start to see results.
- “The Government must adopt a requirement that a specific percentage of all it’s procurement will be through small and medium businesses” This is beginning to sound like positive discrimination. Much better to ensure that the procurement systems are set up to allow SMEs access – simplifying the administration required for applying will ensure SMEs aren’t priced out of supplying the country’s largest customer, the State.
Having said that, I completely agree with his call for 100MB broadband on every doorstep, his encouragement for a greater emphasis on profitable businesses with a social bottom line and his belief that entrepreneurship is not restricted to the few. It’s perhaps a bit too much generalising with what’s wrong and not enough specific actions to remedy the situation but at least he’s stuck his head above the parapet.