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Pin it

6 February, 2012

If you recognise the image on the left, then you’ve probably already discovered the wonderful, and time-sucking, Pinterest.

I started playing with it about six months ago, and it really appeals to my visual senses, it’s a way to collect and categorise images. It adds a social element by allowing you to re-pin images from others, or to follow others. I’m using it to collect quotes, design ideas, fantasy homes, and “objects of desire” – for all those wild objects I’d buy if I had more money and another twenty rooms to put them in.

Interest in Pinterest has been growing, and it’s currently the fastest growing social media site out there. Even though it’s not easy to get an account; right now you’ll need an invite from a friend or you’ll be on a waiting list.

Given the high level of growth, and the length of time people spend on this site (the average user spends 88 minutes – third behind facebook and tumblr, and a long way ahead of Google+) it’s inevitable that people would see a business opportunity. In fact it’s already starting to rise as referrer site according to a study by Mashable.

So what are the best professional uses of Pinterest?

Product Catalogue

This is the most obvious use of Pinterest, particularly if your products are visually appealing cupcakes or fashion.

Wholefoods group great images of their products, under some fun headings “Eat your veggies” for example. Samsonite have used some boards to display their products

Education

I found two different approaches here, Savannah College of Art and Design focuses on current and prospective students. Their pinterest boards give a good insight into live on the campus and the achievements of their students.

The University of Pennsylvania Career Services on the other hand provides resources for their graduating students, including where to find a job, tips on job hunting, advice on updating linkedin, and image on appropriate interview wear.

Non-Profit

Unicef has arranged their boards according to the themes of the work they do for the most part, but has separate boards for video and cartoons which I found a bit disruptive to how I like to find things.

A more radical approach is taken by South West Key, they’ve got posters from activist campaigns, books related to their cause, and profiles of some members.

Magazines

There are a number of magazines using Pinterest, often as another channel to display their own content. Women’s Running does something smarter, collecting relevant, funny and inspirational images from around the web.

Beautiful Beaches

Locations

OK, this is a no-brainer, particularly if you’re promoting a place as beautiful as Aruba.

Museums

The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art display some of their catalogue via Pinterest, museums usually can’t display all the artifacts they hold, so tools like Pinterest can increase their exposure.

Take-aways

Pinterest is new, but the most successful boards so far seem to have a few things in common;

Be aware of your target audience; the University of Pennsylvania Career Services know who their audience is and match the resources they provide.
Choose great images; the photos on the Aruba page had me contemplating travel.
Go with themes; Samsonite provide some catalogue styled boards, but also play with the theme of travel.
Don’t just reproduce content from your own sources; use the tool to collate relevant content from around the web as Women’s Running did.
Have some fun labelling your boards; Wholefoods, the Smithsonian and Women’s Running magazine pulled this off. You’ve got images there to back up whatever labels you choose, this gives you a little extra freedom.

Tags:linkedin, pinterest, social medai
Posted in social media | Leave a Comment »

Stop Blocking

6 December, 2011

There’s a lot of discussion in our company, and in many others, about how people should be able to use social media, and what guidance employees should have to use it in their personal lives and on behalf of the company. Some companies see social media as a threat – and therefore want to prevent its use. Other companies see it as an opportunity and want to enable everyone in the company to blog/tweet/comment/video on behalf of the company.

Access to social media sites is blocked by the IT department of a company, the reasons given are to do with often associated with risk. This is an approach more common in highly regulated industries, where it may not be possible to discuss client service information openly.

But risk isn’t necessarily averted by locking a service out since staff will use it in their own time; eg if linkedin locked down on basis of cybercriminal social engineering attacks then you’ve only moved risk out of 9 to 5.

For some companies locking down social media use could be the right approach. But if you lock down personal use of social media, and don’t have an internal social media platform, it will not be possible to make effective use of social media to promote your company or defend the company’s reputation. You simply won’t have the skill base.

In fact this strategy will introduce risk, eventually you won’t be able to serve your clients – I recently heard of a case where the communications team could not see a facebook complaint that had been emailed to them because facebook was blocked. Even once they’d seen it they stated that their policy was not to respond to complaints made in social media. They’ve missed a simple opportunity to make things right.

The second common reason for blocking social media is out of fears of time wasting. Given the ubiquity of smart phones this isn’t a real solution either.

In this approach companies try to control their employees’ use of social media. Some tools may be blocked, or blocked temporarily, policies and rules will be implemented and monitoring may be in place with strong repercussions for misuse.

I understand the concerns about reputation that lead to a perception that control is the right answer, but it is not possible to control everything that is said about your company, and it’s not possible to monitor every account of every employer.

It’s essential that companies do have policies and do monitor and act, but it’s also reactive – you’re monitoring and acting on issues, not really preventing them from arising. So it’s not enough.

Use is open, there may be policies in place, but they focus on encouraging use and helping employees use it well. There may be good reasons not to follow an open policy for your company – but the top 100 employers are heading in this direction.

JRC have taken this to the extreme, posting just three rules and then leaving them blank. But if you work in a big company, or a highly regulated industry that may not be enough. Companies like TNT have included some “don’t's” in their otherwise encouraging policy.

Whatever form your guidelins take it’s OK to present the possible negative outcome, I like the clarity offered by Best Buy;

Just in case you are forgetful or ignore the guidelines above, here’s what could happen. You could:

• Get fired (and it’s embarrassing to lose your job for something that’s so easily avoided)

• Get Best Buy in legal trouble with customers or investors

• Cost us the ability to get and keep customers

So which is the right approach to take? I would say be open, but then I’m bound to be biased. Take a hard look at what risks you need to consider, then be as open as you can be.

Tags:blocking, linkedin, social media, social media policy, stop blocking
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Social Media Screening

8 August, 2011

Every so often a story floats to the surface of someone fired or not hired because of a posting on facebook or a tweet. Researches cite figures of a growing percentage of employers checking the online presence of their job candidates.

What devil-ish images of you are online?

Businesses are motivated by concerns of (potential) reputation issue, but there are a lot of types of content that might be in the NSFW category without strictly being a reputation risk for an employer. I mean who hasn’t partied hard at some point in their lives? With the power of mobile phones your worst moments are now up there for posterity.

For many people compromising material is online out of ignorance, but others – perhaps those born into the digital era – have a blase attitude about privacy online. They don’t understand that if a company sniffs a potential reputation issue they’re likely to choose the cleaner candidate. An additional challenge to companies hiring is that they may open themselves up to charges of discrimination by taking on any in-depth online investigation.

But someone saw an opportunity out of this conflict between an individual’s privacy and a company’s reputation concerns. Social Intelligence promises to resolve this conflict and enable “fair and consistent hiring”. They’ll research you online and report back to the employer; if nothing is found the employer hears that you’ve passed and doesn’t see anything they found. If you fail a report is generated and sent to the employer who can then use that in their hiring decision.

Mat Honan from Gizmodo submitted himself for a report, failed it, and blogged about it – including posting the full report. The report lists the specific sites checks and specifies whether an issue was found, and if so what was the issue – and adds a screen shot. The report omits any information that will identify the candidates religion, ethnic origin, nationality political affiliation, marital status and so on. This means that the hiring company is protected from any allegations of discrimination. It’s a smart business concept.

Of course, you can do a lot to help yourself; lock down your profiles, use the privacy settings, be smart about what you post online. If you’re job-hunting check google results for your name and any aliases, if you’re in the US you can use reputation.com to monitor your online presence.

photo from twicepix via flickr

Tags:job seeking, reputation, social intelligence, social media screening
Posted in HR, social media | Leave a Comment »

Social Media Conference Corporate

10 May, 2011

Where's the "like" button?

It didn’t start well, there was a problem with the trains in the Netherlands this morning and when I arrived at the conference right on 9am (OK, 5 minutes past) they hadn’t started and were re-working the schedule as some speakers were a bit stuck in the transport chaos.

I’d been looking forward to this – most social media conferences have only a tiny amount of content that focuses on corporate communications (rather than marketing). So a day of it seemed a great idea. Sadly I’m disappointed. Why? Three reasons.

(1) The schedule was fully packed, too packed – 11 presentations or panel discussions in one day. I could feel my concentration waning by about the third presentation, by the afternoon my brain was fried. The pace was over the top, and at one point we were more than an hour and a half behind schedule.

(2) There was no apparent structure. To be fair the urgent need to shuffle presenters due to the transport issue may have exacerbated this but we jumped from mobile/apps to internal culture, from rumours to guidelines. I think the day could have benefited from a tough look at the structure of the day, and to edit the number of presentations. There are plenty of models out there that could have been used to “hang” the content on.

(3) I feel bizarrely irritated by being given the standard paper evaluation form at the end of the day. I did fill it in, but almost everyone in the room was tweeting the whole day – the conference organisers have an accurate record of sentiment during the day, if they choose to read it.

OK, that out of the way. The good stuff.

Three highlights for me;

(1) The presentations of the Social Media News Rooms, this is something we’ll have to look into this year so it was great to see some different examples; a variety of approaches, designs, features. Hugely useful.

(2) Cecilia Scolaro’s presentation of TNT’s social media guidelines. She explained the company, the problem, the approach very well, and has produced something deceptively simple – and published it under a creative commons licence.

(3) The App building, in one day TKGB built an App, using content partially pulled from the audience. This is another challenge for us to address and it’s cool to see that it can be done easily. The app will be online tomorrow (hopefully!) so I’ll add the link then.

For me the most valuable content was from other companies, and the whole day was a little unbalanced with a lot of consultants or social media expert companies getting a lot of air time. Perhaps that’s a function of the ‘newness’ of the territory, but I hope that future conferences can redress this balance.

Would I go again? I don’t know. I’d look harder at the speakers and the content before I signed up I think, it’s so rare to have a focus on communications that I’m sure I’ll be tempted.

Tags:#smcc2011, social media, social media conference
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Starting with Social Media – The Discussion

17 January, 2011

I had the opportunity to be one of the experts in a round table discussion on Social Media last Friday with young artists as part of the Realisme event. The other expert, with more claim to the title then me, was Martijn Verver.

At the end of the round table sessions the advice we had could be summarised in to two phrases; “just do it” and “tell your own story”. So much for expertise!

But the discussion was really interesting and some of the questions were really pertinent and I’ve tried to summarise the answers here (with links I hope are helpful).

It's about connecting people

Behaviour

There is a real and understandable temptation to focus on the technology, to go straight to the tools. But it’s worth keeping in mind that social media is about how you behave online; it’s about connecting people.

1) You need to be yourself online.

2) You can connect to others – even people you haven’t met before. You can ask them to also “friend” or “follow” you. It will take time to build a following.

3) Should it be in English? If your target audience is international then you probably need your content to be in English; but you can rely on visual content, you don’t need a lot of written content.

4) I’m not comfortable promoting myself, how can I use social media? (This came following a discussion of how social media can be your “marketing department”) You don’t have to describe your work in glowing terms; you can just post pictures of progress or inspiration, and say what you’re working on – let others praise you!

5) You may get negative comments – they will probably be outweighed by the positive ones – but be prepared for it. If you have a mature following your followers may defend you, but you may have to decide whether, or how to respond. Generally speaking discussion is a good thing.

Tools

Perhaps the most questions were about the tools themselves – here are the most interesting.

1) Should I use facebook if my audience doesn’t?

Probably not – at least not to address that audience but you, or the gallery you work with, might want to use it to promote an exhibition.

If you’re using facebook think about setting up a separate fan page for your art, rather than using your personal page. ING Art Management has a fan page for example. This means that you won’t be promoting your new exhibition right after lamenting that you burnt the spaghetti.

2) Should I be on linkedin?

Linkedin is particularly relevant for business, so if you run your own company, or are a freelancer you should be on linkedin, it’s a question of reputation.

Linkedin offers ways of sharing content; you can connect to your blog, a slideshare presentation or display your portfolio.

It’s also worth looking for connections via the groups function, which does give you the opportunity to have a discussion in a ‘closed’ group, and the chance to email members of the group.

3) How can I share my work?

There are a lot of different tools out there; the easiest and most used one for images is flickr, on the site you can share your photos – including with a creative commons licence if you like – and you can contribute to relevant groups, or start your own.

Other tools worth considering to store your content are tumblr, wordpress or blogger or posterous, youtube.

Look for “post to many” options on tools, for example I can update my twitter and linkedin status at the same time – in fact I could update facebook at the same time but choose not to. Being smart about the content can save you time.

Content

1) What content can I use?

Profile your work, update this often even if you draw on older works, perhaps saying how you’ve developed since creating that works.

Photographs , poems, stories or articles that inspire you.

Progress updates of your work – this is fascinating for a non-artist, particularly if you’re working on a bigger project

Behind the scenes – take the visitor through the creation of a work, perhaps as a slideshow or a video. This is really time intensive for you you but it would create a piece of content that could stay on your site/blog and be re-used regularly as showing how you work.

Resources

Mashable – good resource for discussion on the latest tools

Problogger – tips on writing, maintaining and thinking about content

PR squared – tips on promoting yourself online

Etsy – great resource of supplies and artists

Cool Hunting – a group blog promoting great design, get ideas on how to present your content.

Style Cowboys – a Dutch site about design, again with great ideas on presenting your content.

The summary of our advice stands – “Just do it” and “be yourself”. On reflection I’d add “connect”; connect to other artists, connect your content, connect your tools (to be more effective). Have fun!

What other tips would you add? Do you have other questions? Add a comment below.

photo from rent-a-moose via flickr

Tags:content, creative, facebook, flickr, linkedin, Marketing, social media, twitter
Posted in Marketing, social media | 2 Comments »

Building an Online Presence

14 January, 2011

I’m part of a round table discussion this afternoon, for young artists. I’m there to talk about what they could do online.

I had the impression that young people would be super savvy online and I wouldn’t have much to say so I asked the organisers for a list of participants and did a little online research to see just what sort of presence the group already have.

It varies. Most are on facebook, some are on linkedin, one or two came up in pages from the university profiling a project, or in articles about an exhibition. Few came up in a name search as having their own sites.

I was surprised. So I’ve put together a little list of 7 things to think about.

Take charge of your own presence

You want to be talked about? Start the conversation.

Choose your tools

Because you haven’t got time to do everything, choose the tools that you can work with easily, choose a format you can stick to easily… eg; a photo-based blog with one photo of something that inspired you and one photo of your work in progress each week.

Consistent Story

Design, style and tone of voice should all reflect you, and be consistent. That doesn’t mean the same and it doesn’t mean they can’t evolve as you grow as an artist. It means that people seeing your art and your blog/site/twitter page will understand that it’s all about you.

Test your presence in search

You want to be found – you should be on the first page on a name search, even better if images of your work show up as well. Even greater would be if you come up on a search of your genre or style of work, but that’s a lot tougher to crack.

Remember, everyone is listening

Be aware that anything you do online, including comments can come up in a search. Be aware that comments you make on facebook about a client who has commissioned you might be read by that client.

Be alive

Don’t link to sites under construction, if you’re using a blog – use it – don’t abandon it.

Connect

Connect/link your content, use the tools to publish to more than one place, connect to other artists online.

I think that’s enough to start with.

I’ll see what happens in the discussions – I am curious to hear their views on online communication/marketing. I’ll let you know.

Tags:Blogging, linkedin, Marketing, online marketing
Posted in Communication, Marketing, social media | 2 Comments »

Pick a song

24 May, 2010

I’m sitting in my apartment listing to Jason Mraz singing “I’m Yours” and it occurs to me that I “discovered” him in an unusual way, via this clip.

More recently I discovered Charlie Winston while sitting at an Italian restaurant in Paris, where I’d been speaking Italian with the waiters and the song “Tongue Tied” came on which begins;

Now’s my chance, here in France, I’ve gotta give it a go.
How do you say I’m happy ? Estoy feliz contigo ? No ! No !
Désolé mon français est un petit peu confus
Possible que tout le temps si j’essaie
Hablo poco spanish – another stupid english boy !

Which seemed so appropriate for my situation, but the album wasn’t yet out in the Netherlands so I kept checking and a month or so later finally bought it.

These aren’t part of any traditional marketing strategy, in fact both men have full websites providing pictures, videos, lyrics and all sorts of giveaways, they run their own blogs (Jason Mraz is very active on his) and have well constructed facebook fan pages (Jason Mraz has a healthy 2.6 million fans).

Both have understood the value of word of mouth marketing, and how to use online tools to leverage it, neither is using (at least not visibly) the machinery of the record labels. Yet they’re getting attention.

Much has been written about the changes in the music industry, the decline of the studios, the rise of the power of individual musicians and the changing ways of distributing music – including U2′s live at the Rosebowl concert which was broadcast live -and free – via YouTube.

But the problem of attention has remained, how can a new artist gain an audience without a studio promoting him? It’s one thing to load a clip to YouTube but more than 20 hours of video are loaded every minute so how does your clip get attention? How can you build a following? How can you reach people like me, who like music, listen to it a lot, but never go in a record store?

The music industry has been through a period of disintermediation – which means the people between Jason Mraz/Charlie Winston (the producers) and me (the consumer) have been removed. They’ve shown that they can still promote their music and get a following using internet/social media tools. A new model for “getting attention” is emerging. How long before someone spots the opportunity to create a new “intermediary” and start providing that service? Well it’s probably already started, and not by the old record labels.

Tags:distribution, music, word of mouth marketing
Posted in Marketing, social media, think outside the box | Leave a Comment »

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