Have a read here if you haven’t already done so from previous link and tell us what you think?

Sound familiar? Have you come across some people like this?

Social Media to a lot of people and organisations is still very new territory. So if you know nothing about it, as point 3 in this link shows, anyone who is confident and good at self promotion can come across as good Social Media specialist.

At times, you wonder how a Blogger or Video producer, as two examples, can convince someone they can do all the Social Media for them, when all they really know is how to create accounts and fill them with….er…Blogs and Videos!

If you have a water leak in your house do you call a Plumber or Plumbers Merchant? The Plumber of course!

With this analogy, sadly, when it comes to Social Media, many organisations still employ the Plumbers Merchant and wonder why they get no results. If you don’t fix your leak in a timely manner, it will cost you more in damage repair and fixing the actual leak, than the initial cost of a Plumber.

As point 2 in this link shows, for Social Media, you can’t learn by watching or managing. You have to be a doer.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, has a section about successful people and the 10,000 hours rule. If you want to hire a successful Social Media specialist, you might want to check how many years they have producing strategies and marketing their own products and services with Social Media.

One PR company i came across, claimed to be doing Social Media now after “immersing themselves in Social Media for 3 months”. Clearly they are not doing it well based on the 10,000 hour rule, because if you manage to squeeze in 20 hours work per day, it would take about 2 years to get there!

As good a relationship you may have with your Marketing, PR or Digital Agency for the past 20 years, are they the real experts to conduct your Social Media?

Only you know your business and what you want to achieve.

Do you know what kind of value you want to achieve with Social Media?

Like many brands, GAP went through a process of launching a new branding and design of its logo.

Once having launched the new logo it caused a strong public outcry via Twitter, Blogs and other Social Media platforms.

Sadly, rather than embrace the feedback, the immediate response of the CEO was to defend the new branding.

From a design persepective, there are many lessons that can be learnt, but also from a Social Media perspective, there are similar lessons to be learnt:

1. Ask customers what they think of changing a current design/product

2. Get feedback on any new ideas before developing the ideas

3. Don’t persist or defend what is clearly seen as a bad idea

What was clearly a gap (no pun intended) in how they launched and responded to the feedback, is how long it took them to respond to the Social Media uproar.

These faux-pas happen almost everyday with organisations, but get brushed under the carpet as a “lesson learnt” i.e they didn’t know what they were doing in the first place and often still don’t know.

Meanwhile, profits are effected and money is wasted on badly thought out campaigns as they had not thought through how to use Social Media platforms in an efficient and profitable way. Social Media is more than just another PR medium to raise awareness.

Will they learn the lesson that a specialist professional is actually of more benefit rather than reading a few books or asking an enthusiast to do the work?

Only time and loss of profits will tell.

From what i have seen of the previews, it looks great and allows you get get a much richer media experience all within Twitter itself as they have struck deals with 16 photo and video organisations including Flickr and YouTube.

Read more here on BBC website

I recently spoke about Foursquare and Location based services (LBS) on my personal blog and how it could benefit businesses.

As the headline of this blog says, McDonald’s had a 33% increase in footfall.

McDonald’s may be a large brand, but it doesn’t always want to invest large budgets in marketing. With a little help from Foursquare this Spring, the fast food chain increased foot traffic 33% in one day with an investment of less than $1,000.

Read the full case study here.

Want to find out if Foursquare, LBS or Social Media can help your business? Contact us for more information.

Social Media in Plain English

This video may have been produced in 2008, but it still applies now as many more people are beginning to realise the potential of Social Media.

You can carry on with the DIY method, and it will on average take a business between 1 and 2 years to learn what we can teach you in 2 hours.

Or you can join our Kickstart programme!

There is already a lot of Social Media happening in Digbeth and many other areas in Birmingham, even Rubery!

A new name, for a company that has been around a while.

Founded by Donato Esposito, Social Media Entrepreneur and multi award winner, who has been working on a professional basis in Information Technology and the Digital Arena since 1985.

With this wealth of experience, we have been working together with many companies across the globe, helping to increase revenues, drive down costs and communicate more effectively.

As our name says, Collaboratus, us working together.

Communicate to Collaborate
Collaborate to Innovate
Innovate to Succeed

Joined up Social Media from the Heart of England and you can sometimes find us at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe.