I fear for social media at the moment. As the masses start their reserved adoption of social media and the ROI agenda heightens, are we not going to lose the original intent of social media? That is to engage, connect, participate and converse. Something the early adopters have found so exciting. Seriously, why is there a gripped frenzy to make money out of social media?

In the early adoption phase, the playing field tipped to an almost horizontal level as genuine and sincere conversations were abundant. I’m feeling an unnerving tilting towards money making activity now with broadcasting running through its veins now that the masses have sat up and noticed. People de sensitive to fun, human, people to people and social activity who are keen to exploit the economics of social media rather than its ecology.

For every ‘community’ with common purpose in social media, there is an opposite, someone striving to make cash. The next two years are going to be far more interesting than the last, revealing more about our society and how we have been conditioned to operate. The tension between making money and having an impact will be a ’see saw’ battle. In an ideal world the two should be able to co exist but I’m not so sure whether we’ll see a polarisation. We have a fascination in our culture with ownership. Who owns social media? The participants and content creators or the corporates? A question Facebook will need to answer soon enough.

Perhaps, unusually I’m being cynical, or perhaps realistic? But as soon as spaces, places, people, individuals and content are seen as property, where the main value is money, will be the moment we potentially lose the true sense of social media and centralised, corporate behaviour will ensue.

I’ve been privileged to be part of the beginning of the phenomenon and will continue to engage through social media with some fascinating people and inspiring content. I’ll avoid the money making pirates who will start to steal the bounty that is people to people connectivity. I’ll remain motivated by its sincerity and occasionally buy because of peer to peer discussion. But what I’ll repulse against is the broadcast, money, de connectivity of the activity we will see more and more of as the masses stick their head above the parapet and indulge themselves in something they have been underrating for a while now.

My purpose in social media is to connect and converse, the masses had better make sure they don’t start to shout, control and broadcast to me! I’m on the ‘making an impact’ end of the continuum not the ‘making money.’ Just wanted to be clear about that!

Just thought I’d share some thoughts on how the eBook “Hang On” is doing after its recent launch. I’m conscious that lots of people are thinking about a doing a similar thing as part of their freemium model. Claire Marshall at www.RokkInternet.com suggested I do this at the launch. A promise I made and am about to keep.

I’ll not go into the too much detail, I’ll just point out a few facts that may help those of you thinking about making the commitment. I’m going to be honest, would I be anything else! During the production phase, think about these aspects:

1. Budget for it through opportunity cost. What ever time you think its going to take, double it. It cost my company £12k to write this eBook!
2. Do the research and always add your bibliography. Little tip, as you read stuff, write it down then, don’t spend two days at the end immersed in your bookshelf! Even Seth Godin’s started to include one!
3. Prepare for ‘bugger factors.” They always happen. I’d just started the book was on a very creative roll and my Grandmother passed away. Two weeks side tracked by more important things!
4. Get it designed properly by someone who knows how to do something that can be read on mobile, tablets and can be easily converted into an Apple app if so required.
5. Involve people. I’m not saying by reading the content. I personally prefer just to write it and then get the feedback once its done. But ask people to participate in the debate. I crowdsourced the words but would have liked to bring in Linkedin discussions etc if I had had time. Or made it part of my company’s ThinkLAB’s.
6. Its bloomin’ obvious but get it professionally proof read and get a creative comms license.

The aftermath has been fabulous. The launch party ridiculously successful. People networked, connected and have done new business. Perhaps it was the wine, perhaps just the atmosphere in the room, but everyone has fed back what a great evening it was. Many said they had made new friends! More specifically, there have been some fascinating insights:

1. It may be the design but most people are consuming it slowly. One reader said “Its not a McDonald’s , you don’t consume it in one sitting in 15 minutes. It’s more like a seven course evening dinner you spend hours on whilst washing down a particularly good merlot.” Fabulous. Main reason from several readers; apparently the content and the need to digest each ‘word’ as it’s so thought provoking. Thank you thats very kind.
2. No one is printing it. Just my intention!
3. I’ve been surprised by the number of people reading it on their mobiles and, in the last few weeks, the iPad. This perhaps indicates a trend for future eBooks.
4. There have been over 1000 downloads so far. We haven’t even rolled out the full marketing campaign for it so far. Just a launch party (highly recommended) and a little PR.
5. Since the launch, my Twitter account has gone haywire with the increase in the number of followers.

You don’t need to push me too much for me to say it was worth it and as any high end designer will tell you, your main piece of work, sometimes isn’t commercial. I’ve loved the process and learnt so much about myself. It is still early days yet, and I’ll give you a further update in six months! It’s not perfect but then thats just subjective anyway. What it is though, is it’s mine and you haven’t seen anything yet!!

Now thats interesting and if the questions are changing perhaps the answers must too! Last evening I attended the www.media140.com event in Bristol, hosted in the salubrious setting of Goldbrick House. A superb, fascinating venue that upstairs resembled a gentleman’s club, only it allowed women in too!

As my fellow countyman (thats Yorkshire Trey) Alan Bennett once said “”Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.” Well we felt a little like sardines but there were some moments of inspiration that may just provide the key! The line up was exceptional to say the least Gemma Went, Trey Pennington, Paul Squires and Gabrielle Laine Peters. All providing insights and foresights. The key moments of conversation;

1. “Conversation created the brand.” Ande Gregson on how Media140 has been successful.
2. “Something that engages you, is engrossing.” Gabrielle Laine Peters.
3. “This is a time of opportunity for small business.” Trey Pennington.
4. “Think about what you can’t achieve with social media.” Gemma Went.

There was lots more. I’ve been to many events like this and, indeed I’ve also spoken at them and I feel the Q & A sessions are shifting. They are getting down to grass roots. Simple questions are sometimes difficult to answer. But there is a drilling down to ROI and rewards. I think we are being too fluffy with the answers. Sorry to be so bold!

Rob Glover chaperoned me for the road trip up to Bristol, accompanied by the album Sunday 8pm by Faithless (for those of you who kept asking.) We talked a lot all day about the detail and the movement towards what I have called social business. Rob’s analogy of farming just summed it up in terms of the present. Nice one Rob! My take on his discussion point is set out below.

Social media is like agriculture. Its preparing the land for an abundant crop. That magnificant harvest does not happen overnight. It means tilling the land, creating a fertile soil. Cultivating it, caring for it, timing it and doing the right things at the right time. So that when you start to plan, promote, engage, participate and co-create you will reap what you sow. People are expecting immediate results from social media, a typical business desire for insatiable vast return now. It just doesn’t happen like that.

Chris Anderson in his book “The Long Tail” hits this right on the nose with a big thump. We see the big hits in the media like Jon Morter and his Rage Against The Machine project and expect the same followers and fans like that. In real life, the hits are rare and most of us succeed, like good farmers, by putting the hours in, caring for our product, preparing, being determined and being patient. We expect so much so quickly from social media, yet we don’t expect the quick results from traditional marketing. Where is the rationality in that?

We need to stop panicking, understand social media is not the only solution but part of it and start using it to cultivate our eventual results that will produce that exceptional harvest next year. Oh and don’t forget crop rotation in this scenario too!

At the end of this thought provoking evening, Trey said “platforms will come and go but the conversations will carry on.” I was going to ask a question but time ran out. Here it is; “How does genuine conversation flourish?” Answers on a postcard…oops sorry….in the comment box below!!!

The trouble with online stuff is we forget how powerful offline influencers still are. You can plot this on a continuum. At one end of the scale are the people who aren’t even online yet save email. At the other end are those people who spend most of their lives online. For those of us immersed in online activity, its easy to be consumed by it. Focusing all our efforts around online influencers. And, for us personally to be drawn into influencing online too. Online influencers with significant followers are rarely offline influencers too.

This will of course change. Our offline customers will increasingly participate in online activity and its our job to help them get there. We will all, in the next few years, gain equal status both in the physical and digital worlds. In the meantime we need to take some time out to consider how we help our offline influencers. Some questions to ponder:

1. Who are our offline and online influencers? Name them!

2. What is the real value, not perceived value, of our offline and online influencers?

3. How do we engage on a regular basis with our offline influencers and how do we make it work better?

4. How do we as a business, encourage and practically help offline influencers to start online stuff? This is not an option but an obligation. Its our responsibility.

5. How do we physically meet up with our top 25% of influencers online to cement the relationship?

Its important now to look at converging interactions between the offline and online worlds that are authentic, organic and synergised. Bringing the two sets of influencers together and connecting them could make a whole heap of difference to our businesses.

There is an abundance of information on the web about social media that could take a lifetime to read and be all consuming. For some of us it is! However, there is a scarcity at the moment to how to weave this into an integrated marketing campaign.

Some would have us believe that its the only way forward and its the only thing you need to reach new and existing customers. Thats far too one dimensional and we’ll all fall into the trap of traditional marketing if we take that road.

As Olivier Blanchard said at www.wearelikeminds.com in February “Your business doesn’t plug into social media, social media plugs into your business.” He is right. It’s not an attachment, neither is it the only solution. We must not miss the opportunity to really get to the route cause of why we embark on social media campaigns. We can’t also ignore that its just as important to be gregarious offline as well as online.

Before embarking on any social media activity, we all need to go back to the beginning and think about how it is going to fundamentally change, for the better, the relationships we have with customers and employees. The fact is that social media is creating new vulnerabilities and opportunities for business. That can’t be ignored. There are some big questions to ask before setting a blog up such as; how will social media define what is being delivered to the customer.

We have to remember that, even now, most of our customers and users of social media read content but don’t necessarily post it. What that means, for now, is that social media is in a state of mass consumption, not mass creation. We have a long way to go to create meaningful experiences and that, in essence, is our first task!

Just a thought provoker and I’m interested in your thoughts. If you give away stuff for free, at some point, you need to see that go beyond an increase in followers or traffic to your website/blog and turn into at least some currency, don’t you?

Whether you are posting images to flickr, publishing an eBook or participating in a collaborative software development project, you have to get past the potential position of feeling a little downbeat or worse exploited.

This culture of generosity and reciprocation built the web. The notion of sharing and obliging in participation like the Wikipedia case study is at the heart of the web’s recent success. But its also evolving. We need to see that return and perhaps thats where social media is heading. We can’t watch the founders of flickr and other organisations all profit quite nicely from something built by essentially a set of volunteers or by us spending time with someone who never returns a favour. The stakeholders need rewarding too.

If you build a community around your brand who regularly participate in developing innovative ways of doing business, that your company benefits from for free, you need to reward. The winning companies of the future will be those that build incentive frameworks around innovation that adequately ‘pay back’ those contributors whether its financial or non-financial.

Some are doing it already, Ebay, Microsoft and Amazon. But we need to develop this further and get past the less imaginative prizes and competitions structure. Royalty payments, recognition or a bit of free stuff back will be the successful models of the future.

Creating and leading a community is all very well, encouraging people to collaborate on a level playing field exciting, finding an infrastructure that supports innovation and rewards time and effort another thing. Free isn’t free at all, it comes with expectations, time lines and limitations too.

Social media so called because of how it connects people and allows people to share information and ideas. But actually, social media is more fundamental than that. Its social because its helping shape the cultures of the future, its enabling engagement and its aiding collaboration on unprecedented levels.

It’s effect on the continuum of change ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous. In the future, it will assist in the overthrow of governments, research and development activity that creates amazing products and currently, its helping me meet someone in my home city I have never met before.

To critiscise it is natural, to ignore it is futile but it will, itself need to change too. There will come a point, perhaps a Malcolm Gladwell tipping point, where social media must turn into social business on a more larger scale. There are case studies. Dell reckons its generated $3 million just via Twitter. Gavin Sheppard at www.devonshiretea.com recently said to me that its the best marketing decision he ever made joining Twitter because its bringing results.

It’s truly fab connecting with people, its amazing sharing ideas but its hard work, even daunting sometimes. Social media maybe a more effective way of marketing and removed some cash spend but it adds huge pressure to your time. At some point, even us fans, followers and early adopters are going to have to turn those connections into some kind of business. And that’s where we have to claw back the control, take a hold of social media/business, grab it by the horns and decide how we are going to make it work. That’s our role social media/business can’t do it for us, its really a question of time management and influencing your followers.

At the moment it gives us connections, reach and spreadability, in the future we need to start turning that into long term relationships, robust communities and cash.

Had an amazing two hours with some incredible business people last night. Sometimes, my job really is the best in the world. I’ll be posting a series of blogs over the next few weeks to reinforce the discussions we had at Exeter Innovation Centre but its best described by Phil Rees in his lovely post:

http://deface.posterous.com/marketing-is-dead-0

The Dead Poet’s Society scene could not explain any better what has happened to marketing overnight!

Well I don’t need to blog in depth today because Scott Gould has just posted this. Need I say anymore? Just a fabulous overview of how social media needs to be useful…..I think that goes for anything doesn’t it?

Well worth the read, click below.

http://scottgould.me/be-useful-the-6-social-media-presences/

Enjoy….you should, its brilliant!

In October I had to queue to get into the Likeminds Conference in Exeter. This time I was one of the many getting kicked out by Scott Gould at the end of the night!

Well they went and did again didn’t they? The organisers, speakers and delegates raised the bar without creating one! “People to people” was the focus of this full day conference which threw up just as many questions as answers, but that’s the point.

There were particular vibrant and engaging presentations from Jonathan Akwue, Joanne Jacobs, Olivier Blanchard and the irrepressible Chris Brogan. Even the thought of Chris stood on stage in his Superman underpants did nothing to dissuade the audience (sorry you needed to be in the room to get that one!)

There was nothing irksome about the day. Superbly organised with a truly community feel, we all felt a little bit human again. The key lightbulb moments;

1. “When you give people a voice, you have to be prepared for what they are going to say.” Jonathan Akwue. That one  is for all you leaders out there!

2. “Understand, participate and then lead.” John Bell. Yep you got to eat an elephant in bite sized chunks.

3. “Having a prescence in social media is worthless unless you do something with it.” Olivier Blanchard. You know sometimes a blinding flash of the obvious is so bloomin’ powerful.

4. “You have to make people feel special.” Chris Brogan. Many of us commented we did feel special!

The buzz in the room was inspiring and so positive, there were obviously no Daily Mail readers in sight! People talk a lot about the social media hype. I’m curious to what they mean by that. Social media for many businesses is the Titanic’s iceberg and its no good re arranging the deckchairs on the old ship anymore. Its a difficult time for many companies. But, perhaps by humanising the relationships we have with people, we can actually thrive.

This conference showed that even in six months not just the technology has moved on, but so has our thinking. It can’t be taken as a token gesture, its serious stuff and it has serious implications. Miss the next one? Er no!