Storify is one of my favourite online tools

Every time I’ve ever demoed it to someone unfamiliar with it, they always love it and it’s not hard to see why; it has a great UI, is simple to use and has a ton of different potential applications; from curating a news story, a conference or event, to pulling together a discussion taking place on twitter or other places on the web, used in the right way it gives a story depth and resonance.

It was with interest then, that yesterday I saw that Downing Street has started using Storify. The irony of course was this was just as the news broke about the fact that Olympic volunteers have been tightly restricted from using social media while at events.   Storify makes perfect sense as a PR tool, you can carefully craft exactly the story you want your audience to see, with no messy bits that haven’t been approved.  But what number 10 need to understand is that, like any good story, it’s only going to be interesting with colour and variety; if you create a corporate, vanilla version of an event, no one is going to give it a second glance.  The ‘Olympic Cabinet meeting – 200 days to go’ Story from Number 10 is little more than a glossy press release with no commentary or content from third parties (which is of course, the beauty of Storify).

So Number10gov you may find that Storify doesn’t work for you, because if you insist on having complete control over every element of your social media ’story’, you’ll find that no-one will give it a second glance.

Tech and media bloggers fall over each other to herald in the new year with predictions that 2012 will be the ‘Year of….’
I’m adding my voice to that cacophony but with the proviso that I will come back in December, revisit them and we can decide whether I was completely off the mark, somewhere near or, in fact, the leading new oracle.

So my 5 predictions for 2012:

1. From real-time to slowing down. Heard a lot of talk about this at sxsw in 2011 but seeing an increasing number of blog posts about it from tech early adopters and certainly feeling it myself. Have we all gorged ourselves on ‘real-time’ instant communications to such an extent that we are feeling the need for abstinence? Inevitably when these new technologies were created, we all crammed ourselves with them in a feeding frenzy. But frequently now I want to shout “SLOW DOWN”, it’s not a race. Faster isn’t always better.

2. The rise and rise of the storyteller. It’s arguable that storytelling is already the comic sans of the digital world, so much is the term being banded about but there are two sides to this that I want to flag up. Firstly, this is the year that I think more and more organisations will come to understand the importance of storytelling when developing their content for social media content and secondly, the rise of live storytelling in the UK (see The Moth for an idea if you’ve never been to a live storytelling event). The first London Storytelling Festival took place in October 2011 and other small events are popping up all over the UK, like Tales of Whatever, in Manchester. This can only be a good thing. There is nothing and I repeat, nothing that warms the heart as much as a good story.

3. Listening as much as reading. Audio is on the up. Audio stories (see no 2 above and please, if you’ve never done so, go to This American Life this instant and listen to one of the podcasts) and audio for reporting. I know this isn’t new but I think 2012 will be the year that audio in social really explodes.

4. A return to long form. Five years ago, Twitter turned the heads of bloggers and they skipped off into the sunset holding hands, leaving behind a trail of broken and abandoned blogs. This was desperately sad as many brilliant writers went from posting 3 or 4 times a week to once a month if we were lucky. It’s great that so many are returning to those blogs, dusting them off and reacquainting themselves. Yes I know that blogging generally has continued to grow in the last 5 years but I’m talking about the really good, thought-provoking bloggers that you can’t wait to read. There aren’t many of those.

5. The year social media stopped being talked about as a separate ‘thing’. Will 2012 be the year that the overall knowledge level as risen to such an extent that we can stop the echo chamber discussions about whether social media ‘matters’ or how to measure engagement. Personally I’m hoping on this one but realise it’s a long shot.

So they are my wise {sic} predictions. Let’s see how we get on…

*Image: J W Waterhouse’s The Crystal Ball, courtesy oubliette (reproduced under Creative Commons license)

Social media influence is the new black.  Who’s got it? How to get more of it? Whether it matters? All of this is endless debated, dissected and discussed (well, within the walls of the social media echo chamber anyway).  Indeed, an entire industry  has sprung up with the sole purpose of showing who’s the popular/unpopular kids in the school yard exploring the notion of influence and helping brands to ‘connect’ with key influencers.  Klout, PeerIndex and newbie Kred will all tell you how influential you are and about which topics (amongst other things).

To be fair, and despite my sarcasm, although I’m sceptical about measuring influence in this way, I do see a value in it.  But today it looks like Klout have updated their topics and this is where the system starts to fall apart. In the past I’ve been deemed to be influential about Rugby (despite knowing precisely nothing about it), bacon (no idea) and free stuff (again, whaat?) and from today ladies and gentlemen, I am officially influential about… typos.   Now of course I’m as selective in my scorn as the next person, I’m happy to claim some of my other ‘influential’ – topics, PR, Manchester, Marketing, Social Media.  But really, if you’re a bacon maker and you want to connect with me, let me tell you, I’m not the blogger you’re looking for.

Seems I’m not alone in seeing this randomness as many friends in my twitter stream shared this afternoon.  From Octupi to birds, tea to soup, there was an endless list of odd topics.  Maybe someone needs to have a tinker around with that algorithm because while there’s no doubt that it can be useful to know who is (genuinely) authoritative on a subject.  It only works if it, well, you know, works.

Foursquare, Quora, Color – the next Facebook, the next twitter….  Anyone who’s involved in technology knows to be very wary of the hype cycle but occasionally you do come across something that feels different.  You use an app and it feels useful, fun, different or exciting – whatever, the fact is that you start to give it more attention than just the initial 5 minutes sign up, never to be used again (Empire Avenue anyone?).

I’ve started to feel like that about Instagram, the iPhone photo sharing app that’s getting so much attention (it helps of course when you have such heavyweight backers).  On first glance, as with many apps, it’s seems a bit pointless, a jumble of good and bad (some very bad) photos, many quite heavy on the filter use (back to that in a minute) but increasingly, these days I find myself checking my Instagram feed before Twitter.  While accepting that my next statement makes me sounds like a bit of a twit…it really does feel like the earlier days of twitter; a smaller community, more spontaneity, less extraneous stuff to clutter it up.  Of course I’m far from alone in my love of Instagram.  But what I’ve seen much more recently is an increase in the number of blog posts from people saying how much they like it from a community point of view rather than a ‘isn’t this great technology, fun, quirky’ etc.  Greg Povey’s post on just that and ‘when an app feels like the world from‘ Will McInnes both sum it up nicely for me.

An then I had an interesting conversation with Kate Bevan on twitter who feels equally as strongly about Instagram but from a slightly different point of view.  You can view the conversation on Storify but the short version is Kate hates the overuse of filters on Instagram and feels that it spoils the photos and undermines truly creative, quality photography (she’s definitely not alone in this).  This conversation made me appreciate that I look at it from a completely different perspective, which I’d sum up as follows:

- I don’t so much care about the quality of the photos, I don’t use it as an app to find lovely images (flickr is of course, much better for that) but there is something very simple about images, much more so than words; you respond to them immediately, unconsciously – you like them. Or you don’t.  Simple (and satisfying).

- Granted there is quite a lot of ‘Instagramming absolutely everything I see’ but that’s just like twitter is/was.  Excessive tweeters – excessive poster = unfollow.

- Perhaps most importantly, I come back to my point that, like twitter, it’s all about who you follow.  I follow people that I find interesting.  Some of them I find interesting because of the quality of their photos but many are for other reasons – I like to see what they’re up to, they’re perceptive, funny, witty or show me something from a different point of view.

So maybe Instagram’s success will ultimately be nothing to do with the images themselves and everything to do with the community.

* photo is a completely unrelated Instgram pic of mine

*UPDATE 6/7/2011 – I now have a instagram vanity URL  followgram.me/katiemoffat

After coming back from SXSW I was suffering a bit from social media fatigue. Despite deliberately avoiding panels that had social media in any part of the description (always a rehash of the same stuff; the gems at SXSW are in random, bizarre and more pure tech based panels – oh and Clay Shirky), the endless talk about location based services being the next social media landgrab left me feeling a bit, well, bored of it all. Apart from my chat with the lovely James Hart of course

And I’m even more dulled by the never ending “10 ways to demonstrate social media ROI”, “5 ways to build a blog”, “3 ways to skin a cat” blah blah blah.

Then I saw this post by Will McInnes about how taking a break from work, on holiday in the real world, made it even clearer to him how much of a feedback loop the world of social media can be, “Because it has got a bit cluttered and noisy and samey and frankly, a bit overwhelming hasn’t it?” I couldn’t agree more.

But then, just when I was feeling particularly jaded, I had a lovely experience that reminded me of why social media can be hugely enabling. I’ve talked before about the power of social media to build communities but down in London last week I came across a fantastic example. Tweetalondoncab are a collective of London black cab drivers who have got together to offer direct bookings of black cabs via twitter. It’s a great service and one I’d highly recommend. But it’s not the service itself that I wanted to mention, it’s the way in which their use of twitter has helped to build an offline community for the drivers.

My driver was @cabbydavid and he explained how twitter has been fantastic for building a network of like minded friends,”I love it, if it’s 2am and I’m quiet, I just tweet that I’m going to xyz cafe for a cup of tea and I meet up with some of the other cabbies for a chat”. He went on to say that using twitter had expanded his circle of friends and made the whole experience of being a London cab driver, just, well, better. Simple, effective and a reminder that social media doesn’t have to change the world, sometimes it’s enough that it helps us connect with others.

As an aside, we talked briefly about how they could incorporate Foursquare or Gowalla into their services. I’m still pondering this one; tie-ups with cafes, bars? 10% discount offered for cab journeys from various specific check-ins? If anyone has any bright ideas, I know @cabbiescapital would love to hear them.

Oh and I reckon @jackcabnory’s audioboo election updates will be well worth a listen.

*image Patrick Mayon

I’m currently out in Austin for SXSWi, the tech conference that looks at what’s new in the digital world.  As always there are the naysayers who snipe that it’s too big, too mainstream and that the truly cutting edge stuff happens elsewhere but the fact remains it’s a completely unique event that attracts some really interesting people, has a fantastic range of workshops and panels and is, well, fun.  You don’t like it? don’t come, stay at home and moan (tellingly my sister-in-law, who has lived in Austin for 20 years, reckons they’ve been saying that stuff about it since the 2nd sxsw).

This year’s SXSW conference kicked off yesterday and among panels and lunch, I met up with James Hart, the eCommerce director for online fashion retailer ASOS.  James is widely credited with being responsible for ASOS’s phenomenally successful use of social media, an approach that has paid concrete dividends.  ASOS.com attracts over 6.9 million unique visitors a month, has 2.9 million registered users and is rapidly becoming the leading online fashion retailer.  It has multiple twitter accounts which it uses for promotional activity, community outreach and customer relations, a huge Facebook following and its own community on ASOS.com.  Last year they launched ASOS reviews, a site that pulls in quotes from Twitter, classifies them as positive or negative and displays the results; a real-time barometer of customer opinion.  And their most recent initiative is ASOS follows fashion, essentially a site that displays the tweets of other ‘fashion forward’ twitter users.

James was kind enough to answer my questions about how they approach social media, what the benefits have been and what they have planned for the future.

Who is responsible for social media at ASOS?

We don’t consider that social media to ’sits’ within any one department, it’s about treating the customer in the best way possible and that’s everyone’s responsibility within the business.  Essentially we want to make it easier for customers to communicate with us, to buy from us, to ask us questions and social media provides us with a great way of doing that.

Do you measure ROI of your social media activity?

Not specifically no.  We do track our activity but we don’t impose KPIs onto it because we understand that it has intrinsic value.  So if we see that for example, someone mentions us on facebook, perhaps they’ve had a less than great experience, then we pick up on it, deal with it and that has value but we don’t measure it by number of tweets responded to or whatever, because that’s not what it’s about.

What advice would you have for a company that had never used social media before but wanted to get started?

Always start by thinking about the customer and their experience rather than the department within the business, put yourself in the place of the customer, and map out the processes; how they find you, decide whether or not to buy from you, what do they want out of the buying experience itself? then work out which team is best placed to deliver it.

Of course you need to know whereabouts online your customers are, work this out before you do anything.  And be aware that customers want different things and behave differently depending on the social network.  So for us, Facebook people sound off a fair bit and they’re always looking for discount codes, whereas our Twitter customers tend to interact with the brand more. Having said that, although you need to do some research, you can also get so bogged in strategy that it paralyses you from ever actually doing anything.   To an extend you do need to just get on and do it, it’s a bit like the wild west out there, there aren’t any rules and you need to get on and try it out, if it doesn’t work, you can always just change it and try something new.

Talking to James, it sounds like they have some exciting projects in the pipeline and there’s certainly no doubt that they are set to continue their incredible growth.  Our conversation got me thinking about last year’s SXSW where Tony Heish from Zappos took to the stage to talk about how they always start by putting the customer at the heart of everything they do and their social media activity naturally flows from that.   ASOS sound like they take a very similar ‘customer first’ approach and let’s face it, if they can emulate the success Zappos have had they won’t be in bad shape!

In honour of my new site, for anyone who has arrived here without knowing me, I thought I’d do my own. It’s pretty accurate and if nothing else, Wordle always make a lovely picture….

Econsultancy launched their Social Media and Online PR report yesterday, providing a comprehensive insight into how businesses are currently approaching social media (or not) in the UK. The headline to fall out of the report is that the overwhelming majority of companies (86%) plan to spend more money on social media in 2010, and a further 13% are planning tokeep the same level of budget.

But I think of equal interest is whether we’ve moved on in the last 12 months: are businesses really embracing social media or is there still more talk about it than actual action.

In my recent experience the only larger business that are really embedding social media into their business are either a) those with someone at board level who understands it or b) younger businesses without a pre-existing company culture to stifle it. The report bears this out citing lack of knowledge (50%), lack of senior buy-in (33%), lack of resource (32%) and company culture (28%) as the main barriers preventing clients from engaging in social media activity.

It’s also interesting that smaller organisations (turnover less than £1m) are significantly more likely to be heavily involved in social media.Makes perfect sense, it’s much easier to change direction if you’re a nippy speed boat than a lumbering cruise liner.

I was genuinely surprised that when asked what people viewed as the main benefits of social media, “increased direct traffic to website” was only viewed as a “major benefit” by 56% of respondents. I mean what? Brand awareness, customer engagement, reputation management are all vital but perhapsnot understanding how being able to demonstrate ROI by measuring the effect of activity on brand owned spaces, is why we’re not, as an industry, winning the battle of trying to convince clients why they should bother in the first place.
The first three are lovely and what we know to be valuable but on which we can’t as yet put a price tag, the last one can make it easier to open the door to the sceptic at the top table.

Overall it seems thereis still along way to go before social media engagement (is it just me or isn’t digital engagement starting to sound like a better term?) is anywhere nearbeing an accepted part of business operations. As an industry, education and best practice not quick wins, will be the only way to move this on.

That Tipping Point is a way off yet.

Image by Nicora

It may well be that there is a valid reason for it (they vaguely try to answer it in the guardian piece) but if so, they're not getting the message across.

Secondly their PR response appears to be woefully inadequate. There is an overlay on the home page of the site explaining the recall and a 'click here for more information' but you are then taken to a general news page (below) rather than straight to the information, meaning you have to click again to see details.  That page does have a FAQ but again it's a bit woolly about why they are recalling in the US and not the UK.

Thirdly it's hard to see them doing much proactive outreach.  The twitterverse is full of chatter about the recall and yet their own twitter feed appears to be broken? Oh dear Maclaren, come on.  You've got to move now, not in 2 hours or 12 hours or 24 hours.  The clock is ticking…..

Often I find debates curated on twitter fairly dull. Lots of posts all about the same thing flooding your twitter stream and adding nothing but the other day there was a really interesting one set up by hashtagsocialmedia.  Todd Defren moderated a conversation about the role of PRs within social media.  He covered topics such as where does social media belong within a corporate environment,what should a PR plan integrated with social media look like plus the relationship between PR, social media and SEO.

Many people suggest that the PR team within an organisation are not the right people to look after social  media because PR = spin whereas social media = transparency.  I'd completely disagree with that.  Having worked with digital agencies, SEO agencies and PR agencies, I'd say that PR people are the most natural to look after social media because they are familiar with building relationships, generating that 'talkability' factor and starting conversations.  The irony is however that at the moment PR agencies are the least well equipped to be able to handle social media effectively since, with a few notable exceptions, they're lagging behind in their understanding of the online environment.  They need to change that…and quickly.

You can see some of the twitter responses to Todd Defren's questions on the righthand side of the page here (although this page may well change in the future).