Do you use video as a tool to get your point across in business?

If not, spend a minute watching this clip, and see if it helps you think about how powerful a tool YouTube could be for you. I think the crucial point to remember is that video (when used in this way) is an engaging way to get your business point across NOT a measure of your skills as a videographer. People are not expecting Steven Spielberg…they’re expecting value.

Earlier in the year I was speaking at a digital marketing conference called Emarketing Edge. I was one of a number of speakers there, and a few days ago I received the video footage of the event – having a look though I thought that I would cut a couple of snippets from my talk that seemed reasonable stand-alone comments on aspects of the world of social media.

I was lucky enough (or foolish enough – depending on your viewpoint) to pick up my shiny new iPhone4 a few weeks ago and I’ve now had it for long enough to really get a sense of whether it’s any good or not.

I must confess that I recently have moved from being an Apple evangelist to being a bit of an Apple sceptic, but this product steps outside the usual reasons for wanting an Apple product.

Traditionally Apple has offered beautiful products which are simple to use and offer great benefits over their rivals…but also, often these products are far from perfect having glaring problems or omissions. It must also be said that as Apple’s value and success has grown, so has their arrogance.

They make genre defining products which quite literally change the way we behave.

• iMac – the first pretty computer to have a t home and now keep hidden away in the study.
• iPod – redefining how people interact with music – taking their entire collection with them rather than just a few tracks
• iTunes – buying music NOW rather than when you can get to the shop
• OSX – the simplest, safest operating system, by far.
• iPad – well, redefining something, just nobody is quite sure what yet
• iPhone – changing how we think a phone should work and what we think a phone should do.

But against this backdrop of success they have become more and more dictatorial, shutting down access to code, applying distribution pressures & approval processes to stifle developer’s innovation and preventing all developments that they themselves are not driving.

Nowhere can this ‘we know best’ attitude be better seen that in how Apple have dealt with the whole iPhone4 reception saga, which is nothing short of a fiasco. It was a golden opportunity for Apple to demonstrate that they were not like other companies, put the problem right and move-on – yes, there would have been a cost, a substantial cost, but it really would have put clear water between them and the competition. But no, they decided to act like every other company and lie about the problem.

Anyway. Against this backdrop of Apple arrogance I can honestly say that the iPhone4 is the best product I have ever bought. It’s fast, it’s beautifully made, it is capable in everything that it tries to do. Even the camera is good enough to be your only digital photography tool (except in very low light).

So, much as it irks me to admit this. Apple have something to be proud of. It’s a fantastic product and does so many things very well indeed.

Even the reception problem hasn’t really been a problem to me.

So, the iPhone4 is a resounding WIN in my opinion.

I know you’ve probably seen this advert before, if not make sure you’re sitting down because it’s so funny!

This is one of the best bits of viral marketing I’ve ever seen.

Just to clarify, viral marketing where something that you have released spreads…like a virus. As people read/watch/listen to the piece they are engaged and pass it on to the people in their network that they think will be similarly engaged.

The problem with viral marketing is that producing that ‘viral’ piece is incredibly difficult to do because you never really know what other people will like – which is I guess why A&R execs working for record labels get paid so much money. Most companies don’t ‘get it’ as regards viral marketing. They somehow think that what they say about their company is of interest to ANYBODY but themselves, which of course it isn’t.

So the knack with getting this to work is in NOT advertising but just being cool/funny/interesting…unless you’re Old Spice of course!

I love horror stories. Since I was a lad I have enjoyed reading books which have scared the bejeezus out of me. James Herbert, Dean R Koontz, Stephen King and countless others.

But this weekend I read a book that I was lent by a friend which scared me in a way I’ve never been scared before. The book is “Six Degrees – our future on a hotter world” a cold and impartial scientific look at global warming and the greenhouse effect. In the book Mark Lynas draws together all the scientific research about climate change he can find and tries do draw some conclusions about what’s in store for us in the future.

He examines what will happen as the Earth warms by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and finally 6 degrees. The book does not make a jolly read for anyone.

I know that 6 degrees doesn’t sound like much, the lower measurements even less so. After all, in the winter we may experience temperatures of -5 and in the summer +30…that’s a swing of 35 degrees, so what difference will 3 degrees make?

Well, he’s talking about the AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE, not local seasonal variations. To put this in perspective, 18,000 years ago in the depths of the last ice age, where my house in leafy Hertfordshire would have been lodged under a glacial ice sheet almost a mile thick, when human life couldn’t survive during the winter, and where the landscape was blasted by 100mph freezing winds.

This icy place was a world that had an average global temperature just 6 degrees lower than that of today. So, as we play with our planet’s thermostat things will change in ways we can barely comprehend.

At 2 degrees, life will be very different than life today, water shortages, people dying from the heat (as local spikes mean that 45 degree summers will become normal across Europe) and widespread storms the like of which we’ve never seen before. At 4 degrees the human race will be squeezed towards the poles as the great deserts spread north and south from the equator, whole nations will be displaced to new lands. The world will be devoid of much of its biodiversity and widespread famine (and consequently war) and almost inevitable. The Amazon basin will be stripped of trees and there will be no way for us to turn back the clock. At 6 degrees it would appear that human life is pretty much doomed and we may have set-off a series of chain reactions which mean that ALL life on the planet is extinguished.

One worrying thing is that these scenarios are NOT millennia away, they are going to happen in our lifetimes if we keep going as we are. Another point of worry is that IF we cease ALL carbon emissions TODAY, we will be able to limit climate change to 2 degrees. If we keep going as we are…

Anyway, I would recommend that anyone who has children, cares about the environment at any level, or just isn’t a total idiot should read this book and digest what the message is.

Sleep well tonight…you certainly won’t after you’ve read this.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been devoting all of my time to developing a new talk based on the role that measuring and quantifying plays in social media if you’re a smart business, and how you should do something useful with these measurements rather than just looking at what’s happened and trying to work out why it’s failed.

As our sophistication about social media develops, we become more aware of the role that measurement plays. Putting numbers against each of the key measurables is a vital step in understanding your business ROI from social media. But it is just a step. The follower and comment statistics for our brand and campaign are meaningless if they don’t deliver a bottom line benefit.

Anybody who has studied business or run a business of their own will recognise that what a business does is basically very simple.

You buy stuff and sell it at a profit. That’s it…. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking products, services, time or a combination of all of these things, the model is very, very simple. Clearly there are functions which the business needs to have in order for this sale to take place. Marketing, HR, Accounting, Sales, Engineering, Facilities…but they are all there to facilitate the sale which is the engine that drives the business. Even hospitals, charities and governments run in basically the same way, except that their ‘profit’ is not expressed in terms of money.

Everything the organisation does should make the sale happen better – faster, more frequently, bigger, more reliably, to more people. Social Media’s role like every other business function is to facilitate this streamlining.

So why do SM agencies and consultants talk about Return On Involvement or Return On Engagement or return on ANYTHING but Return On Investment?

Because they either don’t understand ROI, can’t measure the return on the investment the client has made with them or – more worryingly – they don’t want the client to see that their work is failing.

ROI is a business metric, and must be applied to everything. If you invest £100 on social media (consultancy, your time, copywriting…) if you can’t measure a £100+ return then that money has been wasted because your business would have been better off NOT doing it.

If you’re not measuring the results then that’s crazy, because how can you possibly make an informed decision without being informed!

So, enter “Reverse Metrics” (my idea!) the science of reverse engineering your social media efforts, measurements and strategy to deliver a given result.

If this sounds like the sort of concept that you, your clients or your partners could benefit from then please drop me a line.

For all of you who are watching this experiment I have now reached the 1000 followers mark. Nobody is more surprised than me. You can read my last blog post here if you haven’t already seen it.

Now I have crossed the 1000 followers milestone – achieved with a tiny bit of management and by automatically broadcasting content which is freely available. To be honest I don’t think I’ve yet read any of the posts and comments that I’ve been tweeting from @AGSocialMedia but despite this the numbers keep growing.

Perhaps the content is startlingly good and I’m a genius without even knowing it? Perhaps I should start to read my own tweets…I might even learn something!

Anyway, I shall start to drop-in some more regular links to my own content and track the results of this and report back when I pass the 2000 follower mark or when something startling happens.

Stay tuned!

Yesterday I was speaking at a brilliant event for the Middlesborough Business Forum…in Middlesborough. Now, I know that England is quite a small country, but believe me it’s a heck of a long way from St Albans to Middlesborough – but certainly worth the trip.

Anyway, there were a number of speakers in addition to myself talking at the event, two that really interested me were Liz Jackson the telemarketing business lady who has overcome going blind in her 20′s to to grow a hugely successful business. Her inspirational story has rightly earned her fame, and MBE and a place on ‘Secret Millionaire’. She was fantastic.

But the star of the show for me, and I expect the rest of the audience, was Geoff Ramm. He was fantastic. His ideas on how to differentiate your business through exceptional marketing and customer service were brilliant, and sitting in the audience you could literally see the lightbulbs coming on for people all around you. But the best thing he did was entertain. He was funny, engaging and simply the best speaker I’ve seen for a long time. If you need a speaker for an event on the subject of marketing I can’t imaging that you would be able to find anyone to match him, and if you get the opportunity to see him in action I strongly recommend that you do…you won’t be disappointed.

I’ve just written a short document for a prospective client that’s a sort of overview of Social Media., and I thought that it might be worth sharing for those in that kind of ‘I know about social media, but I’m not quite sure what I know’ kind of place!

Firstly, social media isn’t an advertising channel, and it certainly isn’t a cheap way of talking to large numbers of businesses – but it is a very efficient way of engaging large numbers of businesses and if part or all of your sale (assuming that you ultimately do a good job post-sale) is relationship based, then social media may very well offer a very attractive and appropriate way of achieving this engagement, helping to fill the pipeline, and making prospects more likely to buy from you.

Perhaps more interestingly though, it offers a way of engaging clients post-sale which is both less invasive then the old email/telephone/newsletter route, and potentially more effective, because smaller real-time snippets require less commitment to read and absorb.

Of course there is also a looming threat that as potential clients gradually migrate away from email towards more focused and closed systems, companies which are unable to embrace these new techniques are potentially going to be left behind or at best be playing catch-up with their rivals.

The main thing is to give your clients and prospects a choice of ways to engage and get close to you, today you wouldn’t dream of not having a telephone an email and a website…tomorrow it will be all of these and various social media platforms too.

So, in summary this is what each of the social networks can offer if you do it properly.

LinkedIn – a way to engage with businesses at a professional level, identify your targets, meet them, prove your credibility and convert them to clients. Although this is the most business focused network and a good starting place for most businesses it has its limitations. Globally only 72million members and low level of sophistication within the user base means that it may not be possible to connect with the right people, but if you do there’s a good chance that you can impress them. Also with the membership growing at in excess of 500,000/week at the moment there’s a good chance the people that you do wish to target will be there soon.

Facebook – although predominantly a social network people buy from people. Meeting, knowing and liking your potential clients cannot be a bad thing. Also with a membership of 520 million (including 30 million in the UK) pretty much everyone is going to be there. The loyalty of the member base is also incredible with over 50% of the members loggin-on at least once every day.

Twitter – although 140 characters doesn’t seem link much, therein lies the strength. With communications limited to s very short blast, people have time to read the ‘tweets’ that they’re exposed to. Longer messages can be delivered by point the reader at a web page somewhere, but the knack is to ‘hook the reader’ in that first few characters. This informal irreverent channel is a great way of spreading news in real time and although the tweets are gone in no time their presence is felt for quite a while as they are passed-on (retweeted) and because they are indexed by google.

YouTube – in addition to being the biggest video sharing site on the internet it is the second biggest search engine with over 2 billion video views every day and as part of the Google empire it means that whatever you upload to YouTube is easily indexed by google and displayed in the search results. It’s also worth remembering that video is a very powerful platform for spreading messages – that’s why you cry when you watch some films, seldom when you visit a website!

There are countless (well not literally but loads) other sites/platforms which may or may not deliver value for your business and sector, but these are the main ones which are worth starting with. To delve deeper in to the other possibilities it’s worth looking at The conversation prism to help point you in the right direction.

I hope that this is useful for those on the cusp of getting in to Social Media.

Step No. 3 – Brand

Like any other kind of marketing or communication in Social Media you need to be very aware of the effect your actions will have on your brand – your business brand or your personal brand.

In traditional marketing we are used to working with brand manuals. We often have ‘brand guardians’ but beyond this we somehow have an innate sense of how our actions will impact on the most valuable of our assets – our brand.

Well, in Social Media the same rules apply. It is vital that you have some kind of framework in place to inform what you say and how you say it. This is NOT of course the same as lying, but it is important that you exercise some moderation about your tone and what you  say. Because whilst this is an informal friendly way of engaging people it is not the same as talking to a few close friends in the bar.

Since the 4th of June I have been running an experiment using Twitter – and it goes like this.

For over a couple of years I have been using Twitter to engage targetted people that I want to have a dialogue with. Over the course of this period I have been very selective about who I follow, and have been very selective about the tweets that I’ve sent. As a result of this my following has grown very slowly.

Despite the slow growth, what I have got has been a really good engagement with those that choose to follow me. In return, I only follow back people who’s past tweets suggest that they will say things that I actually will benefit from – but I read those that I follow. I now have 638 followers and follow 68 people – the figures have been in that sort of proportion for some time now. I suspect that most of the followers that I have actually read what I tweet, because when I send a tweet I get a response (not retweets, but positive action – click here, buy now etc). That’s great, and I like the fact that people are following me because they want to, not because I follow them first.

If you read older posts you will see my feelings about auto follow, auto tweeting…

So I thought it was about time that I put this to the test.

So, on june 4th I opened another twitter account, linked it to twitterfeed, google alerts and friendfollow and have automated a series of actions which allow me to send tweets which are both topical and unique to an increasing band of followers without doing ANYTHING whatsoever, then when people follow me I send them a nice introduction DM. Today, my ‘twitter influence’ from this second account overtook my first account – exactly three weeks after starting it!

Now I have 750 followers, follow a similar number people, are regularly retweeted and have never done anything to the account since that first day!

If there is anybody out there who can explain how my ‘twitter influence’ with a disparate group of people that I don’t know, don’t understand, don’t listen to and can’t mobilize into action can be higher than a similarly sized group of loyal followers I would love to hear from you!

Amongst my loyal followers if I ask them to click they do, if I ask them to buy, they do. With the 04/06 account…nothing (although I do get retweets and more followers).

I hope that the companies providing Twitter analysis tools would start to consider that the important metrics are comments, action, engagement and money NOT BLOODY NUMBERS!

Later in the year I shall report back when I pass the 1k, 2k and 5k marks!!!

God help us all.