Live Blog – Manchester Social Media Surgery – 13 April

[Chi-chi Ekweozor]

Photo Credit: Simon Wharton

And we’re off. This is a live blog of the Social Media Surgery at Innospace on Tuesday 13 April. It’s a bit rough around the edges because I tried to capture what people said as they said it but can’t type as fast as Louise speaks! Kidding...! Just my way of saying if you were there and remember it differently, please pipe up in the comments! Thank you.

Social Media Surgeons present:
Jon Clements, @JonClements from PR firm Staniforth – Chair
Louise Bolotin, @louisebolotin freelance journalist who has worked with the BBC amongst others.
Bruce Thomas, @modernenglish director of social media agency Modern English
Simon Wharton, @psychobel director of Search Engine Specialists, Push On

Apologies from:
Adrian Slatcher, @adrianslatcher senior digital development officer, Manchester Digital Development Agency who couldn’t join us as he’s recovering from an eye operation. He’ll hopefully be at the next/a future event!

Liveblogger and occasional interrupter:
Chi-chi Ekweozor, @realfreshtv director, social media training and implementation consultancy, Real Fresh TV

---- start live blog ----

Jon Clements, PR agency, Staniforth chairing the session, kicks us off with the question:

Is Twitter the place to sell?

Louise Bolotin: yes, it’s the place to sell.... myself.
Simon Wharton: social media is an extension of meetings like this: a gathering of people.
Bruce Thomas: cites the example of digital agency Amaze who helped client Flowers Direct use conversation monitoring on Twitter to deliver flowers to people who hadn’t remembered to buy them for partners on Valentine’s Day.

Louise adds that it’s about using Twitter to establish conversations and connections with journalists. Was able to use Twitter to meet people before moving to Manchester.

Received lots of useful advice about local amenities, who’s the best dry cleaner in my neighbourhood... etc etc.

Twitter is about the conversations, listening and building those relationships into something long term.

Dell’s use of Twitter.... offering discounts... listening to complaints about laptops and Vista, Simon adds.

Another real world example:

Twitter’s use in recruitment:
Simon says he was able to gain a new recruit from Twitter and saved £5,000 that would have gone to a recruitment agency. This actually translated to a £10,000 saving as the new recruit recommended someone that has since been recruited.

Bruce shares an example of using social media monitoring to find English cricket fans for new client English Cricket Board. He also cites the example of how Toyota used social media to deal with recent problems with their cars. They found that quite a few people were proud to be associated with the Toyota brand during a PR crisis!

Twitter’s use in customer service:
Carphone Warehouse resolved a problem on Twitter for Jon Clements a lot quicker than he anticipated via Twitter. The call centre process got him nowhere....

Virgin Trains responding to a complaint on Twitter from Louise because she is a journalist who is on Twitter.

We then talk briefly about who should tweet on behalf of a company. The Social Media Surgeons think that the responsibility for managing a Twitter account should be shared by the entire company.

Louise shares how Nestle handled the consumer backlash that happened after they deleted comments about their environmental policies on Nestle’s Facebook page.

Basically, Nestle ended up ‘fomenting dissent’ {my phrase not hers} by deleting comments. Fans ended up posting comments with links to the news articles that Nestle didn’t want to comment on.

A question from a gentleman in the audience querying how ‘grown up’ Facebook is. He associates it with something his kids do whilst LinkedIn is for ‘professionals’.

The surgeons led by Bruce share how Facebook is probably the best place to reach ‘normal’ people, by this referring to the social network’s huge popularity amongst non-techie, media types and celebrities who seem to favour Twitter.

A live example about how conversation about your brand is wherever people want it:

BD Recruitment contacted Simon Wharton more than was appropriate to the extent that he wrote a slightly annoyed (understatement!) blog post that has since indexed as one of the Top 3 search engine results for ‘BD Recruitment’.

Apparently it took them 9 months to find out!

Jon Clements shares how Aviva managed to get an irate journalist ‘on side’ through Staniforths’ savvy monitoring of complaints on Twitter about their client’s brand.

Louise adds that quite a few journalists are on Twitter and that if you annoy one of them they’d take the opportunity to write a story about it.

I share how I’ve used LinkedIn Answers to crowd source answers from social media practitioners ahead of today’s social media surgery.

LinkedIn is a great place to show thought leadership and expertise in your specific industry.

Louise also shares how she sets up LinkedIn Answers to provide her specific questions on writing so that she can help other LinkedIn users.

We spend a couple of minutes looking at a Slideshare presentation on the basics of social media and the excellent Social Media Revolution video which uses stats and clever graphics to convey some insights into the popularity of social media.

Now on to the question about using Twitter for marketing as posted to the Surgeons before the event:

"I've heard its possible to schedule in tweets ahead of time, plugging in your message now to appear at the weekend. How do you do this?" Kate Westbrook

The Surgeons advised that it wasn’t wise to schedule tweets!

Louise said she’d unfollow if she found out someone she is following on Twitter is using scheduled Tweets... “It’s not authentic and implies you are not listening and joining in on the conversations on Twitter.”

My response to Kate’s second question:

“Any suggestions on the best way to manage our social media activity? I have succeeded in connecting our facebook page with Twitter, how would I then link this in with our website?” Kate Westbrook

If your website is using the hosted version of a blogging platform like WordPress you can set it up to send a tweet to Twitter and post an update to your Facebook page every time you write a blog post. That’s the only way I know how to automate this process currently. Tweet me for some advice on this if you wish!

We then discussed Twitter clients after someone asked what they were... Louise and Simon explain they are third party applications for accessing Twitter on iPhones and the Mac/PC desktop. They provide additional functionality to what is available on the Twitter website.

We share tips on using Hootsuite (which I demonstrate) and Tweetdeck. Hootsuite, a web application is great for managing more than one Twitter account and scheduling tweets and managing Twitter Lists. Tweetdeck offers similar functionality but is a available as a desktop client or iPhone (and iPad) app. Has suffered from reliability issues on desktops.

Simon who is live tweeting the session asks people for their favourites...

He logs in to Twitter to show us the responses he gets live on the projector and they range from Tweetdeck (the most popular) to Twitterrific? and a couple I can’t remember.

I ask Simon a rather pointed question about the impact social media’s effect on organic search results is having on the bread and butter of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) providers, Pay Per Click (PPC).

I then have to step out of the room briefly to get a marker for the flip chart as Simon's about to get technical! When I return he is sharing how he advises clients to set up a social media policy. The following come from my handwritten notes as I've moved from sitting at the laptop for a better view:

"Don’t talk about your evening fetish.

(On Twitter) talk about something interesting outside your business

He asks a gentleman sitting near the front about his business/organisation’s needs for social media.

The gentleman responds to share that he is setting up BrightNight, a comedy/lecture night for academics that sounds like a way of engaging more people with universities.

Simon advises to involve the full team behind the event: the team managing facilities/rigging/bookings.

“If you don’t know the answer, say I don’t but I know someone who does.”

"Build up personal relationships straight away... don’t lie"

Simon shares about how SEO requires link building which social media does very well. On that point he says he disagrees with Bruce on the point that Facebook is ‘all-important’ {writing this from scribbles, paraphrased Bruce’s actual statement}:

"Facebook doesn't work well with search and brand related products", Simon continues.

"People are searching on issues not just key words. Ideally, to make the most of social media, analyse your website’s site visits.

Set some key performance indicators (KPIs), be they dwell times on the site, conversions.... Measure something that you can use to assess how well your social media efforts are driving visitors to your website and what they're doing when they get there."

Here's a short video clip of Simon at the flip chart. And another where he demonstrates Burberry's innovative use of Facebook Connect. Both taken with my Nokia N86, for those interested.

Louise shares how she tweets about more personal things in the evenings, whilst daytime tweeting for her is mostly work related.

Social media is about personalising a business. People want to know the real side of you as a business.

Bruce argues that as a small business you get more out of social media by using Facebook. Artisan companies would get more from Facebook e.g. butchers can put on recipes on ‘their’ Facebook Page.

Louise argues you can use both.

Twitter is like the conversation, Facebook is like, ‘come round to mine, my old mate’... Simon says.

To settle the argument I log into Google Analytics, the free website traffic analytics tool and share Traffic Sources for sites I manage like ‘www.realfresh.tv’ and ‘7wondersin7days.com’.

The majority of traffic for the former is from Google and then Twitter whilst on the latter the majority of the traffic is from Google and then Facebook. Social media sites are very important traffic sources for websites.

Bruce argues that as a destination, Facebook is the best website. If you want to fast track people onto your site, creating a presence on Facebook is the best option....

A gentleman asks about whether a Facebook group is better than a Page.

Bruce shares 3 key points:

Personal Profiles on Facebook have a limit of 5,000 friends
A Facebook Group has mass email functionality but limited support for content
A Facebook Page allows you to have an unlimited number of fans, supports notifications and content.

Bruce also shares what his company does: make Facebook Applications (Apps) for the music industry.

Someone asks what Facebook apps are.

Bruce explains:

"With Applications, Facebook allow you to programmatically put an 'event' into Facebook.

A developer can connect with Facebook's Application Programming Interface (API) and cause the 'event' to interact with a user’s profile. For instance, the 'event' (aka App) can show status updates based on what the user does.

He predicts that going forward Apps will become Tabs within Facebook and illustrates by showing us Smirnoff's Facebook Page complete with active Tabs,

Simon says something really key:

"Use Twitter to build relationships. Use Facebook to market."

We then talk about Twitter Lists, Louise shares how she uses Lists to organise people on Twitter into separate groups. Here's one I just created listing all the Surgeons who have volunteered to be panellists at Manchester Social Media Surgery events to date.

We discuss Conversationlist, a dynamic list that updates with who you’ve been talking to on Twitter.

We mention Listorious, the Twitter list ‘directory’ that allows you to search for ‘comedy lists’ on Twitter, for example.

In essence, you have the opportunity to find Groups of people on Twitter based on the classifications others have used to group them within their individual Twitter accounts.

And... there endeth my notes!

---- end live blog ----

We talked about a lot more but like I shared, I can’t possibly type as quickly as the conversation happened!

Thanks so much to everyone who came. Hope you got a lot out of it. Feel free to carry on the discussion/conversation on Twitter. If you have any further questions/queries, please post a comment below.

The next Social Media Surgery event is on Tuesday 11th May at Innospace, 5pm-7.30pm.

The theme will be “What small businesses can learn from how social media is used during the 2010 UK elections.”

Sign up to attend.

[Simon Wharton]

Thanks for providing us with the opportunity to rattle on. I enjoyed it

[Chi-chi Ekweozor]

Thanks so much for coming on the panel, Simon. Ridiculously late reply... earnest nonetheless :)