Social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit.
July 22nd, 2009

You are not your brand online — and especially not on Twitter

Yes, good interaction on the social web is all about personality. But. Brands aren’t people, they don’t have friends, desires, dislikes. They don’t have time off. People do.

So if you’ve decided that a Twitter account for your brand is the way to go, think very hard about the separation between YOU and THE BRAND — even if it’s only one or two of you that do the tweeting.

It may seem like an easy decision, you want to be on Twitter (it’s the next big thing, everyone says so) you want to promote your business or hobby — so you sign up for the service as @SuperPlumbing or whatever. But, think, who do you expect or want to follow you:

  • There are people that know you — they may be interested in your business too.
  • There are people that don’t know you — they may be interested in your business.

If you treat @SuperPlumbing just as a username for your personal account, but tweet about your business:

  • People that know you will get fed up of constant business tweets (if they aren’t heavy users or fans of your service).
  • People that care about your business are put off by the personal stuff.

Is your business “relaxing with a beer after a hard day”, is it “at a #goodmeeting with @anotherperson”? No it isn’t — you are. Does your business have conversations with friends? Not really.

Get a separate account for yourself, and one for the brand.

Creating a Twitter account for a business or a brand (or even a little project you’re running as a hobby) opens up a new communication channel. You need to think about what it needs to say, how it decides who to talk to, what it talks about and how often. You need to think about how you monitor responses — following everyone just isn’t a great option. You need to think about who responds if you’re unavailable — if you’re a proper business you in effect need a CRM system (software or just practise) that makes sure responses are done.

Brand accounts don’t need to be serious, or even focused, but they need to be inclusive.

If you tweet too personally, to or about a group of people that you follow (but of course not everyone will be) then that creates exclusivity — that in itself will put people off, never mind the irrelevance of your activities to the “fan”.

Using Twitter as yourself away from the brand is a good way to see how people use it (so do it first), plus you can do what the heck you like.

I personally have likes and dislikes about how people tweet (although I wouldn’t assume to tell you what to do at all), some people I love in real life tweet in ways that mean I just can’t stand to follow them (too much, too much retweeting , auto blog posting) — but you need to find your own feet and react to people in whatever way you wish.

One thing that is annoying is the creation of a brand account and then retweeting all of the tweets to your personal account too (if people care they will follow…) — separation again, tell me about you, not your business.

Or tell me about your brand, but not you. Tell me both, but separately.

by Jon Bounds | Posted in good practice, twitter | View Comments | Tags: ,
July 22nd, 2009

Hyperstokal – Hyperlocal Blog Wire improvements using Stoke on Trent

I’ve just cloned the Birmingham Hyperlocal blog wire and created a version for Stoke on Trent. Clare White suggested the sources from this list and this delicious tag. Pulling the sources together reiterated to me that for this to work well the source list has to be maintained by someone with a good deal of knowledge of the local area and blogging scenes — you need to find them — and also it helps to have this experience make the decision of which blogs are merely local (based in the area) and those that are hyperlocal (in this sense about the area).

The Stoke blogs gave a chance to try out a couple more of the “tag adding” inputs (Stoke having a couple of art blogs and one that focuses on music):

(Remember these add contextual information to all of the posts from particular feeds.)

A new thing was to take a blog that uses good metadata (in this case D’log) and use that to filter before adding to the pipe. D’log has a “Stoke on Trent” category and as it’s using Wordpress it’s possible to get an RSS feed just for this. Consistent metadata (categories or tagging) is unfortunately quite rare, but if a site uses it and runs on a decent platform then you can filter at this level.

Unfortunately D’log doesn’t allow Yahoo Pipes to fetch information from it — this may be because it was creating heavy traffic in the past — using it produces a (408 User-agent timeout (select)) error. To solve this you can route the feed through Feedburner – which will handle the requests.

This time I also experimented with adding a forum feed to the pipe — it may produce too much noise so we will need to add a filter to that, we’ll have to see.

Try out the Hyperstokal pipe here.

July 21st, 2009

Goverment Dept. Twitter Strategy

Neil Williams, head of corporate digital channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), has turned BIS’s Twitter strategy into a generic template Twitter strategy for government Departments.

It’s a fascinating document, and very useful and extendable to other organisations (with tweaking). Basically this sort of thing (or thought about strategy at the very least) is important because you can’t have conversations with an organisation, only the people within it – so it’s worthwhile detailing how they are to act when “speaking” on behalf of the organisation.

Use of Twitter opens up another method of communication, and while the ideal is to hire people who understand how to use social media (or train those that already work there) it’s very useful to have guidelines and overall strategy. What happens when the person tweeting as your organisation is on holiday? Who makes sure that responses happen (what’s the CRM system for incoming tweets)?

It doesn’t need to be this detailed, but it is important to think about it – and the metrics for usefulness are well worth thinking about too.

by Jon Bounds | Posted in social media, twitter | View Comments | Tags: , ,
July 9th, 2009

Hyperlocal News Wire

Here’s a pipe I’ve created that attempts to marshal the content from hyperlocal blogging in Birmingham and allow people only to subscribe to feeds that interest them. This is a piece of investigation and experimentation that I’ve been able to find the time to do thanks to Will Perrin and his hyperlocal blogging initiative Talk About Local. Will also helped define the reason why it would be useful to do — for what he called “lazy journalists”.

Lazy here is used in the same way that it might be used — in praise — of a computer programmer; that is, lazy means you’ll work hard at setting yourself up right to make sure you get everything you need easily later on. Will got to the crux of the argument by saying that journalists interested in a subject — let’s say noise abatement issues — could easily find examples of those at a local level outside the areas they physically know.

So this is a run through of the decisions made in building it (and what other options could work), it’s no more than a prototype at this stage so comments and improvements are very welcome. However if you would rather just get stuck into the pipe itself, head on over.

Read the rest of this entry »

July 9th, 2009

Open data may need to change the way data is collected and stored

Like Nick Booth, I was pretty excited to hear of the results of this FOI request for data about parking fines from Birmingham City Council. Not so much as because I care about parking fines, but because of the opportunity to see some of the huge chucks of data that we’re all pressing for release automatically rather than only on request. This request (check out the wording for a great example of how to phrase these requests so you get everything you ask for) was put in by Heather Brooke as part of an investigation on the new Help Me Investigate site (disclaimer: I’m part of the community management team on this).

Plotting the data on a map (alongside other data) could show all manner of things — but more importantly raise questions that are worth investigation: are regulations enforced more in certain areas, does enforcement contribute to lowering numbers of accidents on those roads, whatever anyone cares enough about.

But, not easily. Yet. The spreadsheets reveal that the location data in there is just shy of being able to be plotted on Google Maps (or similar) without altering:

Book1

The locations aren’t detailed enough for plotting by the tools we might use quickly, for use internally in Birmingham City Council they’re fine. As things readable by humans they’re fine. But to quickly pop something on a map there’s no tool I know of that will let you say “all these roads are in Birmingham, UK” — so the mapping software can’t plot.

Of course you can write a script to add “, Birmingham, UK” to each (or do it by hand) but that’s not simple — it becomes the work of coders rather than “the public”, will enough people be interested?

Yes data in public is better than private, yes get any data out there so some people can use it; but to really unleash the power then that data will need to be collected and stored with “free” use in mind. Are organisations ready for that?

July 5th, 2009

Blogging and Pyschogeography

My talk at Moseley Barcamp, based on this post about Conversational Psychogeography.

Moseley BarCamp – Blogging & Psychogeography from bounder on Vimeo.

Audio by the award winning Rhubarb Radio & also available here.

Listen to all the other talks here. A wonderful day, thanks to everyone who either came, spoke or organised (Shona and the lovely guys from Aquila TV especially).














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