I recently attended an interesting talk where the effect of social media on mental well-being was discussed. The idea was being put forward that the positive feedback people receive through social media forums such as Facebook and Twitter (e.g. ‘likes’, comments or retweets) could contribute to better mental well-being as people said, when interviewed shortly after receiving the feedback, that these interactions gave them positive feelings.

However, this got me thinking and I wondered how these people felt a while later. Was this feedback enough to fulfil their needs for social contact or were they left feeling a bit low and wanting more?

I personally feel that the positive feelings that a person receives from a social media interaction can be much like the sugar rush that they would get from a chocolate bar. They think that it will be what they want, but soon after the high of getting it they realise they have not solved their hunger. In terms of food, we then know that it is a proper meal we need. However, had we not been taught this would we have simply gone for another chocolate bar? I feel that this could potentially be the harmful cycle that many people, particularly those who are less outgoing, may go through each day. Prior to the influx of social media they would have invested their time in interacting in ‘real world’ relationships. However, I wonder if many people may now be reaching out to social media channels as the easy option to try and gain that social contact that people need to stay happy. The concern is that they are then not being fulfilled by the results and perhaps can’t break the cycle of looking for their social fulfilment online. With the statistics for depression set to rise further over the coming years I feel that social media could potentially have a part to play in this.

Obviously there are marginalised groups of people for whom the world of social media is a genuine lifeline to gaining social contact. However, I feel that for the majority of people this is not the case and it could easily be that social media is resulting in as many low feelings as it is highs.

I think that social media has a role to play in peoples mental well-being, which could be both in a positive and negative way. However, this is essentially an online world that we have created and I think that healthy and unhealthy behaviour surrounding social media is something that needs to be brought the forefront. People live out their lives online more and more every day and it seems that this can only be set to be an increasingly current debate.

Antony raised several points that really struck a chord, how our personal privacy settings online impact everyone; friends, family and colleagues. When was the last time somebody took a photo of you and asked instantly if it would be okay to publish it on Facebook? Surely these are issues we need to discuss with one and another?

Instead of just allowing the web to dictate how we are seen, why not invest a little time to be the main source of information that is published about us on the web? To find out more have a look at Antony’s top ten must have pieces of advice for looking after your web shadow.

Thanks Anthony for a great lunchtime discussion that left us all with a lot to think about.

We have included a video of a few questions Anthony answered for us.

Or to watch Antony present at TEDx.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Facebook recently and I’ve got to admit I was a definite late comer. I use it to keep in touch with family and friends who are scattered around the globe. Sadly, the days of receiving a letter in the post have gone, and now we’re reduced to scanning status updates on people’s walls. But I digress…

What I have been thinking about is the idea of companies talking about providing help ‘at source’, particularly with reference to Facebook. The idea is a very simple one. Wherever my customer is, that’s where I need to be to help them at their hour of greatest need: now.

So if I’m on Facebook and have a problem I don’t want to have to suddenly click off Facebook and go to a company’s web site, fill out an email form and wait for three days for a reply. What I want to happen is not only to ask a question or complain on Facebook, but also get a reply or at least an acknowledgement on Facebook as well. And hopefully I’ll get some kind of response in less than three days.

There are an increasing number of companies now providing options for people to ask questions or complain on their company pages. Many have created specific ‘support’ or ‘help’ tabs. Here you can usually find FAQs, live chat, or the option to ask a question or leave a comment. Others simply default to their wall or the discussion tab.

This got me thinking about the idea of ‘at source’ this morning. For me, ‘at source’ is not about going to a company’s page and asking them a question or complaining there; FAQs, in my mind, is a different proposition. In some respects this is only one step up from going to their web site and emailing them – same interaction just a different platform. The differences being I don’t have to leave Facebook and my question or complaint is published in a relatively more public space.

For me, ‘at source’ is about me posting a status update that might be a complaint or question on my profile page. It’s not necessarily about going to a company’s page to do so. I’m aware, however, that this is potentially fraught with difficulty. Should a company cross over into ‘my space’? What is the etiquette?

This notion of ‘place’ and ‘privacy’ as it pertains to customer service is an interesting one, particularly on Facebook, and one I will be looking at in more detail in 2011.

Through making the most of the huge audiences on social networks including Facebook and Twitter, Diabetes UK successfully launched a ‘challenge’ site which resulted in massive increases in fundraising donations and visits to their website. This clever use of social networks provided an excellent example of the viral effect that social networks can have. Friends were encouraged to challenge each other to tasks, which would result in sponsorship if successfully completed. This project followed a user-centred approach, where the interests and expectations of end users were completely understood prior to launching the site.

Speakers from Youth Net also demonstrated a hugely successful project that utilised digital media, including online video and imagery in an art based competition. Since Youth Net is not a sponsorship based organisation, their objectives were very different with the primary aim to drive traffic to an area of their website. Again this project worked fantastically, utilising social networks including Twitter, to spread the word of this competition.

This conference demonstrated the huge potential that the digital space has in generating awareness and fundraising opportunities, at a fairly low cost for charities. The projects that were presented were all success stories, which were perfectly suited to their target audiences. However, this didn’t happen by luck. The user-centred approach that was undertaken was integral to ensuring that the digital tools used were most effective for the target audience of each charity.

Digital fundraising provides an amazing opportunity for conferences of this type, where knowledge and experience from case studies is shared and provides an excellent place for not for profit organisations to learn from, and inspire each other.

It’s still possible to let our views be known manually through a letter or even face-to-face if we so desire. Most of us are perhaps more familiar with expressing opinions via electronic channels, such as telephone, fax, e-mail, forums or blogs. But now more people than ever before are also venting their spleens on digital or mobile platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TripAdvisor –even FourSquare, Google Maps, and in the future on emerging applications such as augmented reality.

What all of this means is that not only are there now more ways to complain than ever before, many of these methods have evolved from private interactions to belligerently public participatory ones. The very act of complaining has transitioned from a closed private space to a much more open and public one, often involving not only direct participants, but also interested voyeurs who invite themselves to throw their hat into the ring on any topic they choose.

This move away from a reliance on individuals to a reliance on technology reflects the increasing convenience and ease with which modern communications, and therefore complaints, can be made. These relatively recent social and voyeuristic tendencies of complaining are made all the more easy by the lack of geographic or time barriers to posting or responding to complaints. Complaining 2.0 can quickly take on a life of its own at the hands of those people who have no connection to the complaint at all other than morbid curiosity or passing interest. Any one of us could fire up a browser right now and comment or provide feedback about someone else’s complaint and start making waves in the public domain.

Perhaps the real game-changer has been the development and increasing ubiquity of the smartphone and the explosion of apps. Complaining may have progressed but it certainly isn’t standing still – where the development of technology platforms was catalytic in shifting complaint behaviour, app development is now picking up the critical baton. This shift in technology has rapidly facilitated a move to a more accessible and broadcast oriented medium. Time has also been truncated even further through the use of apps, to such a degree that it’s now possible to complain while the cause of the complaint is still taking place. The act of complaining no longer requires any form of direct human contact, further underlining the evolution over time from complaints being vocal experiences to becoming virtual ones.

In conclusion then, technology may have changed, the ways in which we can complain may have changed, even the proximity of the complaint to its occurrence and resolution has changed. But what hasn’t changed, is that people are free to complain on whatever channels they choose and are available to them whenever their ire rises. It’s easier to complain than ever before. Are you as a business ready for that?

This article was written as part of our September Newsletter

Gordon Brown’s recent leetspeek (mp3 podcast) leading up to the Global Investment Conference (GIC) has sparked renewed calls for tax breaks for the UK computer gaming industry. The PM stated that the UK games industry was “the most important in Europe”, and that UK developers are “by far the biggest producers of computer games in Europe”, going on to promise that there would be “new commitments of investment off the back of [the GIC] conference”. Interesting words, encouraging perhaps for some, but is it just more talk? Considering The Digital Britain report was full of high praise for the industry but so far has yielded few tangible initiatives, and a previous request from the industry for tax breaks failed to get a mention in the Chancellor’s December 2009 pre-Budget report, one could be forgiven for (quite skeptically) thinking “the cake is a lie”.

Thankfully, the industry has its very own Super Mario in Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East. Watson, known for his advocacy of the local gaming industry, set up a Facebook group called Gamers’ Voice which attracted 15,000 members in it’s first two weeks. More recently, he has taken the PM at his word by tabling an Early Day Motion (EDM) calling on the Government to implement a tax break for game production in this year’s budget. In an interview with gamebiz.com, he describes how he gathered support from “Labour, the Lib Dems, the Tories and the SNP to support a motion calling on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to introduce tax relief for the video games industry”. Read the full interview at gamesbiz.

The pressure is on the Government to act, with an election looming and an electorate jaded with pretty words and empty promises. The Tory Shadow Arts minister, Ed Vaizey made similar noises at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts event ‘Playing the Game’, saying his party would “look seriously” at support for the industry should they get in this May. Typically though, this was tempered with warnings that nothing may be possible if they were to inherit an economic mess…which, sadly, seems fairly likely.

The UK currently leads the way in revenue from game sales (£3.3billion in 2009) despite a 20% dip during the recession. But other European countries such as Germany, Portugal, Sweden and The Netherlands weathered the recession far better with software sales staying fairly constant or even increasing, and the gap is narrowing. Clearly the Government relishes the revenue which the gaming industry brings in and are making all the right noises about support, but the economic crisis cut deep and all rational economic models say that the worst way to pay off a deficit is with tax cuts. So from where will the quid pro quo come? Is this simply a case of “You scratch my back, I’ll pat you on yours”? Or perhaps more accurately, “You scratch my back, and I’ll treat you like a cash cow and do nothing while you hemorrhage talent to Canada and the USA”.

Facebook turned six recently and celebrated the milestone by giving its homepage yet another makeover, this time to “improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features”. Six years is a long time on the interweb but, even still, Facebook has made impressive and significant gains in that time. It currently sits at number four on the list of biggest names on the web (behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, respectively) and with over 350 million users (and growing fast) it is poised to very soon become number three. It’s become the “face”, as it were, of the social media space, if not the brain. Facebook is sitting on a veritable gold mine of highly detailed and often intensely personal information about its users; things they would never dream of telling anyone but their closest confidants, let alone a market researcher, making Facebook a veritable marketer’s wet dream. But much like war, “woah woah woah, what is it good for?” What do users actually “use” Facebook for?

Marketers claim to be reaping the benefits, as evidenced by the explosion of ads in Facebook recently, but is it to users’ benefit or their detriment? What are We getting out of the bargain? Is it enriching our lives or just making it easier to sell us stuff? Where social media succeeds over other media is by convincing its users to do the advertiser’s work for them. Every time we click a link or join a group, we might think we’re engaging in solidarity (support single sex marriage) or activism (RATM for Xmas No.1) or showing off our pop culture cred (Invader Zim), but what we are really doing is posting ads in our friends’ news feeds and sharing ads with them. As Facebook UK’s Commercial Director, Stephen Haines, puts it: [P]otential customers can directly engage with your business by clicking on the “Become a Fan” link or the “RSVP to this Event” link…this action automatically creates a story on the person’s profile page and possibly in their friends’ home page “Highlights”, generating free distribution for you.” Facebook “fan” pages are never going to replace a corporate presence on the web, but social media offers an interesting way for marketers to gather data on users’ opinions, behaviours and preferences by allowing them to consciously identify themselves with brands they like without ever feeling like a corporate stooge. And chances are they’re spending a flip of a lot more time on Facebook than they are on the corporate site. Marketers know this and they get it, but I’m not sure users do. The distinction for users is that they’re not part of a brand, they’re part of a community which identifies with that brand…but for all intents and purposes it’s an online focus group.

Similarly, market researchers are getting in on the action with Facebook Polling. Next time you click on one of those seemingly innoculous polls at your friend’s behest, thinking you’ll get to see how closely your opinion ranks against your cyber-buddies, you’ll effectively be clicking on a banner ad. You’ll also be giving the marketer who paid USD$50 to set it up the poll a candid view of your opinions, behaviours and preferences in context with the 99 other people who clicked it in your geographic region. Ray Pointer of Virtual Surveys told utalkmarketing.com: “These polls are clearly not going to replace U&A or ad-trackers, but they could spawn new ways of working. Traditionally, we have expected everything to be designed before the research begins, but often the basic assumptions were wrong.” Any one else reminded of the opening lines of HG Well’s War of the Worlds?

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

I wouldn’t go so far as admit to the intelligectual superiority of our marketing bretheren, but they sure are some clever people.

An article was published the other day that questioned how worthwhile it was for companies to spend money on social media , in light of a new report that discussed the predicted increase in social media spend in 2010. According to the article, companies have spent more time on social media this year than ever before and that more companies are focusing on this medium as a marketing strategy.  
This inherently means that companies are spending money directly or indirectly on social media. However, as is a familiar complaint, “fewer than a quarter of companies are able to see a ‘tangible’ return on their investments”. This trend is also seen at the same time as a slow down in the growth of the use of certain social sites, an example given being that “the number of users on Twitter has actually declined in the past three months, with a growth down by 8.1 per cent” .  

While the initial ‘hype’ might be decelerating, rather than slowly being abandoned, social media usage and social networking are now becoming familiar and standard ways for people and businesses to interact. Social media is used by companies for all manner of reasons and to meet numerous different business needs. As social media becomes more mainstream and familiar, it is down to businesses to become more efficient with how they use this medium. Now the hype is dying down, it is no longer an achievement to be implementing social media, businesses need to become more shrewd and sophisticated in their attempts. They are generally talking to a more tech-savvy audience than would be the national average, and social media is slowly beginning to lose its mystery to the masses. 

If there is a sufficient business need, it is wise for companies to start investing in social media but with one condition; that it is planned. Planning of aims, and what constitutes success is essential. This means that ROI can be measured effectively, and the strategy can be refined further based on the results of this. This is more important now, than it has ever been; and in the future will surely sort the success stories from the failures.

Interview with Ashley Friedleing, CEO of Econsultancy

• Episode title: An interview with Ashley Friedlein
• Episode number: 4
• Series: Expert Interviews
• Duration: 27 minutes

Listen now: Download audio file (ashley-friedlein-on-twitter.mp3)

Or, Download the Ashley Friedlein podcast (12mb)

An abridged version of the conversation between Ashley Friedlein and Paul Blunden can be read in our August Newsletter.

Alternatively you can also read the Podcast transcript

At a high level it means that there are currently few people creating the content on the social media sites, but a great deal consuming the content that is created. On the one hand this could be explained as behaviour that should be expected. As general consumers have not hitherto intended to submit journalistic quality copy until social media’s advent, so they may be quite rightly reticent about producing content for public consumption.

On the other hand, as we learn to communicate in a different way through the use of social media, we will learn through time that we can produce content without fear, and mass adoption will occur.

With social media on the increase across the globe, there is just an excess of personal information we are divulging on blogs & SN profiles. “Overshare” is Webster’s New World Dictionary’s word of the year.

Overshare (verb): to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval.

That mass adoption will, and is leading now in the US to “Oversharing”. The description above lead us to a new challenge with social media. According to Forrester’s 5 Eras of the Social Web, we are currently in “Social Colonisation”.

Forrester’s 5 Eras of the Social Web

Social Colonisation is about having a shared ID between social media – so when you update a Twitter status it updates your Facebook profile automatically and more than that, it can be done from a mobile app such as Twibble for Blackkberry.

The timings that Social Media commentators at Forrester are putting on it’s 5 eras of the social web are all obviously dependent on the apps and technology being built. So far they are looking appropriate, seeing the take up of shared ID and so we are already in the 3rd era of the social web. A good way to explain the social context and the last phase of commercialisation of the social web is to look at examples. WAYN and Flirtomatic are good examples of commercialisation. WAYN makes money for its customers on the platform by allowing them to “sell” on information about places to visit, and Flirtomatic has one of the most successful flower-purchasing shops on the web to complement its single flirting platform.

But my favourite example must be how Simon Cowell lost an estimated $4m from NOT understanding the social web. When the unofficial Susan Boyle video appeared on Youtube (shortly after the show aired in the UK and added to Youtube by a TV fan from Newcastle) Simon Cowell’s production company should have had a buzz-tool running with contestants from the show as keywords, but they didn’t.

They had no idea that the viewed video on Youtube had reached a staggering 1.2m people after a few days. Nor did they then after a full week react correctly. They ought to have submitted an action to Youtube to remove unauthorised video of Britain’s Got Talent, submitted their own version with a post reel ad outlining the UK telephone number to call to vote for Susan Boyle in the final; thereby making at an average call value of 55p, and 44m views of the video somewhere in the region of $4m on worldwide calls. Some social media purists may argue that taking down videos is not on, however, good content that has to pre-reel ad to break the experience would have been accepted by the masses, as they would rather have good content than shoddy sound and images.

Who’s good at social commerce?

[Images of WAYN and Flirtomatic home page]

Who’s doing this? Can newspapers start charging for online content work?

The Guardian considers charging for content:
LONDON – May ‘09: Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, has revealed that the newspaper publisher is considering charging for content in some specialist areas of Guardian.co.uk

News International
NEW YORK – April ‘09: News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch has led calls for newspapers to charge for online services.

Who else is making money from Social media?

Who’s good at facilitating this?

[Images of Blast Radius, Buddy Media and Friendfeed home page]

Mash up payment system

[Images of TipJoy home page]

Interlocking Social Media – making it pay

Brands need a strategy around social media, and the understanding needs to permeated throughout the organisation if it is to work.

NB: Since this article was published, News Corporation, publisher of The Sun and The Times, has said it will begin charging for all online content within one year.
Read article by UTalkMarketing

Back to July /Aug newsletter