Like Minds 4: Memorable moments

Like Minds 4: Memorable moments – snippets and quotes from speakers and panelists

Chris Brogan, president of US-based New Marketing Labs, told the conference the excitement around social media as a communications tool was similar to what happened when the telephone emerged in the 1930s and then email at the end of the last century.

He said: “All social media has nothing to do with technology, but with remembering to be human. It is not about the buzz, it is what you do with it. The magic you can have is in seeing people and just connecting with them.”

Conference co-founder Scott Gould: “We are group of like-minded people who understand that what motivates us is the connection to the people that we serve.”

Darren Forsyth, CEO of digital and social media agency 140 characters, said: “Every organisation has to get their head around the fact that we are in a two-way communication world.”

Exeter City Centre manager John Harvey said the public sector faced the danger of being distant from the people it served. Using social media allowed him to communicate more effectively with the public. He said: “We are generally pretty ropey about communicating with real people. What is significant about the connections I have made through twitter is that I am connecting with people who I didn’t know existed, and who didn’t know I existed.”

John Bell, of the Washington-based 360 digital team of communications agency Ogilvy, which works for brands including Ford, Unilever, and American Express, said he had seen a big change in companies who were at first dismissive of social media, then wanted to ‘jump on the bandwagon’, now they  believed and understood how it would change their business. His work was now focused on transforming the way business worked and communicated with their customers.

Adam Stone, managing director of Exeter-based Rokk Group, said: “For us having these superheroes of our trade coming here and discussing their latest discoveries and thoughts is fantastic. It puts Exeter right up there at the cutting edge of our movement.”

Max Nadjm of BSkyB said it took a year to introduce social media widely within the organisation, including Sky News which encouraged all its journalists to use twitter. He said: “We are not there yet, but we are working on it.”

Gemma Went, of PR consultancy Red Cube Marketing, said it was important to create a strategy and guidelines for users. She said: “The key thing there is how you train your staff with the guidelines and policy. Get them to have some buy-in and understanding, get them to have some input so that it gets included in everything they do online.”

Like Minds 3: Playing the game

Like Minds 3: Joanne Jacobs on the importance of location, environment and games

Delegates were told games are becoming increasingly important in business as culture becomes more visual than text-based.

Australian social media consultant Joanne Jacobs said three crucial areas of digital development for mobile devices were location-based applications, which deliver services relevant to where people are; augmented reality, which gives more information about places; and games.

Ms Jacobs said people had less time and were travelling more as work and life became more mobile. This meant services for mobile devices like smartphones were becoming more relevant. And people were more likely to find value in playing a game with a chance of winning.

She said: “We are becoming a society that is much more visual. The new generation is a much more visual culture, the older generation is more text based.

“We actually have to give people the opportunity to win. You are far better when you are doing engagement if you let them win.

“If you want to invest in location-based aps, augmented reality and gaming, the time is now.”

Like Minds 2: Raising funds and support

Like Minds 2: Amy Kilburn and Helena Holt on charities and social communications

HOSPISCARE fundraiser Amy Kilburn told the Like Minds conference how the internet was changing they way the Exeter-based charity worked.

She highlighted the story of patient George Owen, who wrote about his experiences in an internet diary known as a blog.

He wrote about details of his illness and treatment and also his thoughts and feelings.

The last entry, by his wife Christine, was an announcement for the date of his funeral, on December 14 last year at Dalwood church in East Devon.

Mr Owen wrote in the introduction to the blog: “I have cancer, and I am having so much trouble keeping friends abreast of developments that I decided to try blogging as a solution.”

Mrs Kilburn said the diary had been useful for staff treating Mr Owen and for his friends and family.  It provided day to day information for his family, for example to bring him yoghurt to help him take his tablets and hats when his hair started to fall out.

Like Minds 1: Social media changing lives

Here are some snippets from my coverage for the Express & Echo of the Like Minds social media conference in Exeter, on Friday, February 26. Some appeared in the newspaper, others were unused, but I thought I’d publish them here in case anyone was interested.

Like Minds 1: John Akwue on how social media can save lives (First published in the Express & Echo Saturday, February 27)

Jonathan Akwue, director of Digital Public, a digital communications agency which has carried out projects for the Ministry of Justice, the NHS and the Department for Children Schools and Families, explained how social media was having a major impact on people’s lives.

He said his agency had worked with the website www.netmums.com, which had a chat service where users had talked about suicide. But through the website counsellors were able to help them deal with their problems.
Mr Akwue gave another example of how his agency was brought in when the NHS realised it was failing to reach young girls at risk of teenage pregnancy. He set up a virtual clinic with the website Bebo which reached 46,000 girls, who spent time online talking to counsellors. The transcripts of the conversations showed that using the service had led many to change their behaviour.
Mr Akwue said: “What does the future hold for social media? Massive opportunities. We are just scratching the surface.
“You can use social media to change people’s lives. You can use this to save people’s lives.”

Community and trust are at the heart of local media

Local is shaping up as the big media battleground. Twitter is offering increasing localisation. Smart phone apps can tell services exactly where you are. Now Google Buzz is the latest social media player to focus on your location. According to Mashable, Buzz will be fully integrated with Google Maps so you can see the conversations going on around you. And this obviously gives an opportunity for locally targeted advertising to find you. 

Of course traditional local media companies are online delivering the news and much more in their patches. There are local bloggers and national players focusing on the same territory. And as mobile social media develop, there’s a lot more noise going on out there. Some of it will be people breaking news via their social networks. So journalists have to be part of these networks, in a transparent way, monitoring the streams, filtering what’s useful and acting on it. They should then be posting confirmed and reliable updates back to the networks.  Amidst all the rumour and gossip, which are after all the currency of informal conversation, people want a reliable source of facts. And that can still be from a news provider with a trusted reputation and a place at the heart of the community. But this principle is not new.

A few years ago I worked as a reporter on The Orcadian, the weekly newspaper for the Orkney Islands. The close-knit community had a population of about 6,000. It really was a case of everybody knew everybody. Not much happened without it quickly becoming common knowledge. But the paper had an almost 100 per cent penetration – nearly everyone read it. There was queue outside the main newsagent in Kirkwall on publication day every Thursday. People wanted to confirm from a reliable, independent and trusted source what they may have already heard. The paper added value by ordering the news and delivering the facts. It was at the heart of its community.

The media scene is now more complex, with a variety of ways to deliver news and real-time digital platforms becoming the foremost. But the guiding principles of being a trusted source at the heart of a community remain crucial to what journalists do.

Twitter for journalists

The micro-blogging site Twitter has opened up a whole new channel for journalists. You can  sift through the endless real-time stream of comments, looking for nuggets to turn into stories. But it’s much more than that – it’s a way to engage with colleagues and audiences like never before. And in my view that’s the most important thing for journalists to understand – engagement is a two-way process and in the Twitter world it’s more important to give than to receive.

Twitter is in tune with the basic human need to communicate. It is a recognition of what we have always known – we are all connected. Now Twitter, like Facebook,  has created a space that people are filling with conversations.  And it has allowed communities to grow. Networks are being created based around towns, industries, brands and people. There’s a very human, sociable dimension to interaction on Twitter. On-line networks are being turned into off-line communities.

Journalists are trained to stand on the outside looking in. But that’s not the way Twitter works.

Think of it like walking down a high street. There’s a stream of people walking past, some you know well, some a little, most not at all. You stop and chat with a friend, they introduce a friend, you find a shared interest, your network grows.  How successful would you be if you just stood in the crowd shouting out, demanding attention? You’d be ignored.  So you listen, introduce yourself, develop connections and, all being well, you’ll be recommended to others on the basis of what you’ve got to offer.

That’s my view on how you should approach Twitter. For much more on ways to use it and the tools available, there’s a useful guide on Mashable.