Category: insights

Social Media Club Wellington | Back To Basics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi1bfyHCfQE

The fundamentals (of social media).

It was a pure privilege to speak at the Social Media Club Wellington this week.

As a reflection of where I am, transitioning out of the social media specific career, the talk focussed on the idea of getting back to basics.

Here are the links to the stuff featured:

I’m available for hire if you liked what you saw / heard.

As always, I try to reference everything used but sometimes the content has no source or was collected years ago and has since been lost. Let us know if anything is yours and will certainly give proper credit.
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YouTube Loves Bebo | The Little Things

why bebo

What’s wrong with the above picture?

Click the ‘share’ button under any YouTube video and you’ll get these options.

It’s not until you click ‘more’ that the opportunity to post to much more popular social sites like Twitter, tumblr, Blogger etc. appear.

So why does Bebo get the nod before these other sites?

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It’s About Intimacy | The Privacy Debate

confirm ignore

The big friends request debate.

I got a ‘friend request’ from gentlemen whom I met briefly at a conference. My approach to Facebook is to use it as a place to cultivate relationships:

  • of people I know
  • have been introduced to by trusted contacts
  • or built up a relationship through other social spaces

*moving to the other side of the planet makes this platform a lot more important medium than normal.

I explained my reasoning to said guy of how I use this platform as a more personal network and also gave him links to this blog plus my Twitter as alternative ways of connecting.

Was interested to receive his take on how he thought “false psychology to disconnect the personal from the professional” and how it was a very old way of thinking.

For me, it’s not about privacy but more about intimacy.

Just as the media landscape continues to evolve so does our use of the many platforms available to us. People forget we can decide how we use them. We can define its uses.

How do you decide to use your social spaces? Do you? Is this thing on…?

Buy the mug

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Currency Of Likes | The Social Shopping Experience

Connecting social to the real world retail space.

*If you don’t speak Portugese make sure the closed captioning is on.

Brazlian-based CEA posts images of their clothes on its Facebook site. When fans ‘like’ the items, the total number is displayed on the hangers.

It can either work to validate the choice or run counter to promote the decision to choose a lesser ‘liked’ item.

Whatever, the execution is wonderfully delicious and has potential in other spaces:

  • used in the school cafeteria to decide on which dishes to offer
  • employed during a conference as an ad hoc voting system on speakers
  • operated by branding agencies to shortlist logo designs

Where else could you see it being used?

Originally seen on Adverblog
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How To Write A Social Media Strategy | Use Cartoons

gapingvoid-social-media-strategy-pics

Seriously!

The above are the images recently used in the internal social media strategy I wrote for the executive team at CORE Education—all courtesy of the fab Hugh Macleod, Gapingvoid.

The focus of the strategy was on:

  1. inspiring staff—VISION
  2. offering opportunities to develop their social media education and sustainable pathways for future use—TRAINING
  3. create success points and reflective opportunities—MEASURE

The vision provides an horizon line. A goal. An outcome focussed narrative.

The training, which all staff will take (managers first of course), attempts to bring everyone up to the same educational mark of social media and digital literacies (even if it’s not what they do).

These two things I’ve been doing for the past six years.

The last point is where the fun and new stuff is. Utilising gamification we’re going to develop in in-house system for tracking and rewarding social (media) participation. We (meaning others with bigger brains than I) might even write a paper on it all.

How do you do yours?

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Education vs Life | A Thought

education vs life

The answer to learning.

Most formal/traditional/current education systems provide lessons with the view the learners at some stage will complete some kind of test to prove understanding, skills, knowledge etc

Life on the other hand, provides tests and it’s up to us to make sense of the lesson (with the opportunity to pass that knowledge, skills, understanding etc on in some way).

Because I didn’t know better, the social media training I’ve developed and delivered in the past takes this test-first approach. Providing a problem to solve and a reflective space to discuss the lessons learnt (sometimes after failure), meant highly engaged participants with fantastic feedback plus obvious learning outcomes.

Would be fun to reverse the current educational paradigm of teach, learn, test.

Then again, that’s just my opinion—say otherwise in the comments below.

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Otautahi Youth Council (OYC) | Social Media Training

The next generation of story-makers / tellers / influencers.

Honoured to have delivered some training for Otautahi Youth Council (OYC) (who are supported by the fab Christchurch based White Elephant Trust).

“DK’s training not only opened up a new world of social media to us but motivated and empowered the young people participating to take action in their community with their new found tools.”

Netta Egoz, Project Coordinator—Otautahi Youth Council/ WE Care White Elephant Trust

The focus of the day was on several social media platforms as well as the strategic side of implementing their use. The following were the fundamentals (Golden Rule, Storytell, Digital Takeaways, Process):

If you’ve ever had the privilege of working with young people you will know of their quick adoption of these online platforms—the button theory in action—was a fun day.

Pay me to do something similar.

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Designing Processes / Experience / Brand | Closer To Launch

wireframesmall

Shaping the online offering (above is the wireframe of the site design)

Getting the product right is half the story, the overall brand experience and even the process of checking out needs due care and consideration.

Taking notes and learning from inspiring folks such as generalassemb.ly and:

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
Jeff Bezos

Related to The Best Damn Public Speaking Course On The Internet (Even The Planet) and Why Develop An Online Speaker Training Programme | The Purpose, The Why, The What
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The (Social Media) Lick

On the one hand echoes never tell you anything new.

On the other, they reinforce a fundamental.

The wisdom comes in knowing the difference between the two (in the cacophony of social media discourse).

Btw, the blog post above was more for me than you.
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Google Has Gone All In | The Big Gamble

Will it pay off… or not?

From the clever fingers / brain of Marco Ament:

It’s easy not to “be evil” when you’re ahead. But when you’re backed into a corner and your usual strategies aren’t working, it’s easy to get frustrated, scared, and angry, and throw previously held morals and standards out the window.

Google’s foray into social networking was late.

They knew this. The reversal of some of their key policies, touted as differentiators (such as now welcomes young people, when it said it wouldn’t and now it allows pseudonyms, sort of, when it said it wouldn’t), smacks as a little desperate along with the ‘Google+-button-creep’ into all of their other product lines.

So why are they going all in?

Maybe, it’s not to create hoards of long term users (especially when you take into consideration how users only spend 3 minutes on the site last January, compared to half of the same time for Pinterest users or 7.5 hours for Facebook maniacs) but more the fact that it simply increases their ability to productise your ongoing use of their other platforms:

Google scrambled to build Google+ because it watched Facebook and saw users were willing to volunteer biographical data to their social network, and that data is crucial to serving accurate ads users want to click.

From the insightful Google doesn’t care if you ever come back post—which is why you’ve already cleaned out your Google data… haven’t you…

Being such a big Google fan and user, this is a fascinating scenario to watch play out.

Especially if you extend the metaphor a little further with the knowledge that you might get lucky, but in the end, the house always wins.

What do you think, will their gamble pay off?

My name is DK. And I approve this message.
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