What's Your Social Networking Strategy?

Wednesday 18th June 2008

Friday 13th - The Brief From Hell!!

Friday 13th June 2008

Text in Context

Monday 09th June 2008

Text and email are in many ways just like talking. However, in a business context these are also all-too permanent records of a marketing conversation. Businesses must be aware that all communications, however seemingly informal, can have serious marketing and legal repercussions for a brand.

We use these communications channels so much but none of us should ever take them lightly. I have seen countless examples of poor communications by text and email that are not only unprofessional, they could damage a brand irreparably.

Here are some of the main Dos and Don’ts.

DO
Have a text and email policy and publicise it well internally
Re-read every email before you send it
Spell check
Think about the context and be clear – put all the material facts down (it’s easy to jump to conclusions without all of the facts)
Add the subject line
Provide your job title and contact details in your signature.
Check the recipients’ details are correct – don’t send to the wrong person (or a competitor!)
Check that you have added all attachments before you send (the number of times I’ve seen that happen)
Manage your emails – filing daily
Think carefully about who you CC and BCC

DON’T
Ever send an email in anger and click ‘send’ too fast – save as draft, reconsider (and then probably phone instead)
Write or attach anything you would not feel comfortable being read or seen by anyone in your business.
Use abbreviated text, unclear jargon or SMS short cutsin a business context.
Forget to notify people if you change your email address – particularly with renewals of domain names
Use email for critical feedback (good for public praise).
Depend on the spell checker
Leave a long email trail that isn’t needed anymore.
Use your ISPs domain – use your own domain name
Use UPPER CASE – you’re shouting!
Break your own rules!

Top Web 2.0 Tools

Thursday 05th June 2008

As part of this series on Web 2.0, I researched countless directories, each containing over 200 Web 2.0 Tools, but I think that a marketer’s life is far too short to trial every single one. This is a much more refined guide with helpful commentary on each posted by users (in true Web 2.0 style):

http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Top100Tools/toolset.html

The opportunities for marketers are stunning. Here are some Web 2.0 Tools that I will be living with over the coming weeks:

http://www.netvibes.com/#General
News aggregator – a web page of all your favourite RSS feeds.

http://www.flickr.com/
Photosharing site – a superb site for images for your KeyNote or Powerpoint Presentations – I just produced an entire slide presentation on Web 2.0 for a major international finance conference, based on Flickr images!

I hope you find these practical toolsets useful. I look forward to sharing more with you more about these developments during the coming weeks, as well as some fresh insights into differentiation. How can you use these new toolsets to Create Your Own Space? Please do write and tell me.

Testing Web 2.0 Features

Wednesday 04th June 2008

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between Tim O'Reilly  and MediaLive International. Far from a DotCom 'crash', they recognised that new brands were emerging where the platform IS the Web!

The next time a company claims that it's 'Web 2.0', test their features against the list below:

- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

What is Web 2.0?

Tuesday 03rd June 2008

Even if you don’t fully understand what Web 2.0 is, the chances are that you make regular use of services which operate on the Web 2.0 platform. Web 2.0 services use the Internet as an operating platform, in order to create products and/or services that could not exist outside of the World Wide Web.

I’m talking here about web services, not packaged software. So, we don't just read and publish stuff any more, we participate. We don't just use directories, we provide the content and add our own tags so other people can find them (something that's known as 'folksonomy'). It's ours to share. We're harnessing collective intelligence. We view user generated content on Wikipedia, we see what other people have bought on Amazon, we communicate our ideas with blogs. We get in touch with people on Linked In, Facebook or MySpace.

You’ve all heard of Wi-Fi in the context of online broadcast media, now one of our major clients, Vision Critical, is developing  what we have branded Fi-Wi. Financial Widgets that pull data together automatically (in what the technical guys refer to as mash ups) and present the customer financial data back to us graphically in precisely the way we want to view it. Now that's pure, true Web 2.0!!

Web 2.0 Series - Welcome to Wiki World

Monday 02nd June 2008

"Wikis will start to affect advertising in a positive way and help us identify constituents we want to touch," said Rod Smith, VP-Internet emerging technology at IBM Corp. Wikis can "help us position a new product and can provide good intelligence as we segment our advertising."

Opening up IBM's wikis to customers "would be a great way to engage folks in our ecosystem about a new ad campaign before spending a dollar."

"The hardest part of communications is to explain a new product, and sometimes we get too technical. But wikis allow nontechnical folks to talk about what their expectations are for a new product. You can feed off that from a marketing and advertising perspective. As wikis take off, I need to ask people in our markets: How can I engage you and how does that translate into product features that can touch those markets?".

Financial brands and their trade associations have an opportunity to build a 'Wikipedia' about their industry and invite participants who are steeped in that subject matter to engage in a collaborative way.