Plain and simple:

#1:  It’s something online

#2: It’s new

I tweeted these two often seen misconceptions about social media and Dave Witmond replied: ‘3d largest misconception about social media: it’s social‘ . Even though I think this is a misconception indeed, I think it’s included in my two earlier statements. Stating this is pointing to the fact that people seem to believe that this new way is something that indeed new, while it isn’t. Media has always been social! As Dave responds, it’s not the ’social’ part that’s new: it’s the way of presenting it, the interface if you like.

If you’d like to point to the fact that what people seem to call social media is much faster, more interactive than everything before, you may have a point.  New technology allows for much faster, almost instant feedback, sharing and interaction, but it is not something new! The scope and the way we do it, that is what is new!

At school you learned to write of course just making words but, at least here in Holland, also how to write neatly. Just writing sentences in the neatest, most beautiful way you could in a notebook. If you would do that really well, the teacher would give you a colourful sticker in your notebook to award your good work. The real fanatics would of course want a sticker like that every time! A nice way to make learning something, writing in this case, something fun. You can find similar gaming element online, which combines the urge to save things and the urge to compete into one serive: Foursquare! Visiting your favourite bar is nice, but if you are a really frequent visitor you would of course like to hold on to that ‘mayor’ status.

Since I wrote the initial version of this article, things have already started changing more in the general direction I’m describing here. But maybe that’s all the more reason to put it here as well. One of the nicest aspects of Foursquare is of course connecting with friends and seeing what they’re up to, but the one thing that makes it so attractive is the badges system and the fact that you can become mayor of a place. Last year, Coen Jacobs made more or less the same observation when he was putting up Brightkite against Foursquare and Gowalla. (in Dutch) This element of play makes a service like Foursquare or Gowalla something people want to keep on using: it adds a playful element of competition and it looks good as well.

Of course this is not a new idea in the world of marketing: having the consumer play, having people earn points and thus creating loyalty has been existent in different forms for a long time already. The nice thing for us here, however, is that this is an online service that is used (moslty) on mobile devices. It is perhaps one of the first really successful location based applications, although you might wonder what exactly is the goal of all this: does it have any use at all? A business model to this service may not appear to be all that clear, but this doesn’t stop the service from growing rapidly, making the first commercial initiatives to be based on this platform approach rapidly as well, and actually we’re seeing that happening right now.

Opportunities.

The fact that the play element is well used to keep people engaged and even to attract new users is of course really great, but what can Foursquare do with all these users?

The answer to this question is twofold. First there is that element of play itself: collecting badges is an incentive and it can thus be used to guide visitors to certain places. From the start Foursquare noticed this opportunity and actually used it at it’s introduction at SWXW by handing out special badges when ‘checking in’ to certain spots, venues, at this event. Imagine how cities can use this to guide tourists to certain spots, perhaps sending them to new interesting places instead of the usual hot spots! This way, cities, festivals or brands can make a Foursquare into something that actually guides the movement of people. (Of course Fsq. would earn money in this case by allowing special, custom, badges for certain places.)

Secondly there is another, maybe even simpler way of cashing in on the number of users by thinking about the venues themselves. Because if you are a frequent visitor of some place, why wouldn’t you be thinking about getting a discount, for example? With this idea in mind Starbucks is handing out custom badges as a start, but says it wants to think about using Foursquare to test ‘alternative reward strategies’.  This is indeed not all too far away from collection points or coupons somewhere or perhaps even more like collecting that sticker in your notebook!

When we realize that the internet is still changing every day and that the mobile web is really in it’s infancy then we can expect to see more and more of these new initiatives arise very quickly from now on. Location based is no longer just a nice thought, it’s really something that can be used and can be useful!

And don’t forget: don’t cheat with your checkins!

This article is loosely based on an earlier article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.

Even though you can find some nice sharing options for ’social media’ sites on the bottom of each post here already I’ve decided to experiment with a new one: the new facebook ‘like’ button. (To the right of this post) Clicking on this button will immediately post the article to your facebook profile as a ‘like’, if you’re logged in, and it displays a nice overview of how many people liked the article. In addition, I’ve ‘liked’ my own online persona, the fan page that Levi Boitelle made for me earlier, and put the accompanying Facebook ‘like box’ on the home page of my website.

If you’re wondering how you could add a similar thing to your own website; here is a very quick walk-through. As most of it is lined out very neatly on the FB pages, I will refer to those for most part, in fact, Facebook provides you with a nice how-to here on their Like Button page.

First you will need to decide where to place the button, so open your CMS/Wordpress and find the place where you want to include code for the like button. (Usually you’d want it per post so in wordpress you have to add it per single post.)

Then you can fill in the variables on the ‘Like Button’ page Facebook has (see above) and fill in some preferences, hit ‘get code’ and you immediately get some code that you can enter at the spot that you’ve chose. (Depending on your site’s setup you will need almost no to a bit more html or php knowledge to do this in a good way.)

As you may notice you get the option of directly usable code or a single line of code that uses Facebook’s own markup language ‘XFBML’, which basically uses a Javascript library to generate the appropriate code for you.

As this latter option looks much neater I’ve chosen this one. For this you do need the code that includes the Javascript SDK, which you can find here. You will probably want to include this in your header file. After you’ve used this in your site you can easly add like buttons, boxes and more for integration with facebook by just adding single lines of code, adding a simple ‘like button’ will be as easy as adding ‘<fb:like width=”200″></fb:like>’ to your code somewhere. If you’re planning on including more FB integration, like the box on my home page, I would recommend adding this Javascript SDK in your header file, or a similar place, so you can just do the rest with simple lines of code.

Additional thoughts

Is Facebook the future? Well, this depends on how far you want to look into the future. It seems like Facebook will definitely dominate the near future, so in that sense it may be a good idea to add FB integration like this on your blog/website. However, just like me you may have nice ’social media’ integration buttons with your posts already. I’ve already got an extra retweet button, and now these like buttons to add to it?! You should be aware that it makes your page even more ‘full’ than it already is, and always be careful not to make your site the visual equivalent of a pinball game! Facebook seems like a good thing to be a bit more present than other sites, but you may want to rethink adding yet another button if you think your audience is not on Facebook to begin with.

‘Traditional methods like interviewing and surveys seem to prevail and have of course proven their value along the way.’, is what I stated in December last year when discussing research on Social Media. And of course these will remain a, if not the biggest, factor in (market) research, but research in different ways seems to be more and more present.

I also used Harris Interactive as an example of a company that was already starting to use Social Media research as a means of adding to traditional research. Traditional because online surveys and private communities might be ‘new’ but they’re still quite traditional in their essence. The blog ‘Research Rants’ pointed me to a new initiative by Harris Interactive where they’re asking you to connect your ‘social’ profiles to an engine that will analyze your actions in Facebook and/or Twitter.

It seems like they’re using their normal polling panel to build a new panel that uses social media activities instead of surveys to make data-points and build a profile of your opinions and behaviors. We can only guess (thus far) about what and how they will analyze you, but it’s certainly an interesting development.

What do you think, is this ‘paneled’ approach a good thing, or is there a future where researchers will analyze everyone’s tweets, which are usually public anyway? (ie: ‘The web is the panel’) How is the panel used, is it used to make a sample and then include the (pre?) analyzed communications, or is it the other way around? Both ways seem to have advantages.

As I commented on Research Rants; ‘[a] survey might be online now, but it’s still a survey (quite often with little extra options/tricks over a ‘paper’ one), maybe even an online version of one that was (is?) conducted offline as well.’. This Social Analysis could add a complete new dimension to research, but it could also turn out that in fact all these communications tell us about the same as traditional research…

It does seem a bit odd; meeting each other in real life after an initial online contact. It does happen quite often anyway, already since the first chat groups there seems to be a need to meet ‘the other’ in real life. This is how the first ‘internet meetings’ started. While internetting was for the ‘geeks’ at school, some 10-15 years ago you were even more frowned upon if you were meeting those internet people offline as well. Even today online communication is sometimes met with disbelief, but as more and more people have been using the internet it has started to become normal to have online friends. Using this momentum, the internet meeting is starting to break through , maybe as early as this year. This development is not only fun and entertaining; it is also a good way to make contact with consumers, customers and business partners.

Even though internet meetings, even large gatherings, have been there since way before Twitter, it seems to be Twitter that is driving the ‘meeting’ to a new level. Just this year it seems to get to a point where it’s really popular. In Holland there was a Twitterdisco, and a crowd-sourced Twitterparty already. And of course there was the ‘Twittershizzle’ party that I helped organizing as well. Of course to me personally it is this last one that is closest to me, but it’s also the event that got me loads of reactions like ‘we should do this more often’ and ‘will there be spinoff Twittershizzle parties’?

Drink turning into event

Drinks, ‘open coffee’ and other events organized via twitter, facebook and ning are, in my opinion, just the start of things to come. There is a demand and more Twittershizzles or whatever you’d like to come up with will be there soon. But there will also a larger demand for more specialized gatherings, dedicated to making new useful contacts. These won’t be like one of those ‘networking drinks’, just some sort of generic presentation about something or a large sponsored event. These will be different; a mashup of all these, informative but ‘fun’. Currently there is a development in the direction that I named earlier; the offline consolidation of knowledge and contacts by a central ‘actor’ that knows how to find the right people from the online social networks: commercial dating. (On which I wrote an article that for now is only available in Dutch on Bijgespijkerd.nl here)
Yes, of course these are offline events, but it’s setup will make it have similarities with the online social networks. Selected on a specific target group (maybe just ‘self-selection’), but open, honest and with a focus on sharing information and knowledge.

The role of the mediator will play an important role in this second form; the organizing of specific network events, whether you call it commercial dating, or not. I assume a lot of readers will be able to give me several examples of this already. There have been countless examples all over the world of interesting events, in Holland there are “tweetups” and things like “Mobile Monday”. However, I think we will see in the rest of this year that organizations will plan these type of events more on their own to attract a specific audience of consumers, reviewers or promoters and get these all together in a fun but (commercially) useful way.

Maturity

Press conferences, première nights and other presentations which we’ve been familiar with for quite some time, will be changed or altered to a real ‘twitterparty’ or similar event, for like minded people or converted to an event where knowledge sharing will be the key. Essential in this, perhaps not so apparent, renewal of events is the connection to ‘online’ communication-wise during and after an event and the collection of knowledge online to make sure you get the right people there to begin with. These little changes in meeting could mean the ‘meetup’ will start to reach maturity in 2010.

This article is based on a longer article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.

It is often said that the key to ‘how social media works’, or at least how you can gain inlfuence as an actor in social media is staying honest and true to what you believe as a person. (ie: don’t try to operate as a typical company) Although one can certainly make arguments against that, I do support the notion that an open and honest approach is appreciated by many. This is true in real life, but even more so online, where hiding ones true intentions can be a lot easier.

Thus, when it became apparent that the Dutch ‘twitterer of the year’ election was set up by a advertisement agency people began to criticise they way this was set up. Of course it didn’t take long before freelance journalist Bert Brussen announced on twitter that he would take care of organising something more fun. What followed is an example of a typical social media effort.

This is how Twittershizzle got born; an effort to do something fun for twitterers (or ‘tweeps’) that was more than just meeting up for some drinks. You could call it crowdsourcing, but maybe that doesn’t do justice to how these kind of things usually work. With Bert’s following on twitter he quickly gained attention and a buzz of enthusiasm was spreading through the Dutch twittersphere. With friends and colleagues from the Dutch weblog deJaap Bas Paternotte and Levi Boitelle agreeing to help the event was taking shape.

As part of the deJaap editorial board I was happy to do my share in making this event a success. It wasn’t a complete smooth ride, but we all know our fair share of how things work online, so in the end we got it together. Staying true to what we thought would be fun to do, not thinking too much about marketing practices we managed to get it done; #Twittershizzle the Twitter event was born and would take place on the 9th of February.

Word about this event spread quickly, and set up as a free event with artists and musicians participating for next to nothing it became quite something. There was a stream from ‘Ted’, there were paintcartoons, there were writers, there was beer and there was more beer and sigarettes.

(CC Photo by Anne Helmond)

I’ve been setting up meetings for more than 10 years now, from get-togethers in the local pub to lectures, but this was something unique indeed. A nice 300 active twitterers from all kinds of sub groups in the Dutch sphere showed up, along with newscrews from papers, radio and television, trying to see what this could possible be.

Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with organizing something and making a profit out of it. But especially online people want to participate, not just be bothered with offers or things that they should really buy in to. Or as Bert Brussen puts it:

beware of stains on your purple pants

Personally this all is what I love the most about the internet. You get together with long-time online friends, strangers and everyone in between, while others are still trying to grasp what this is really about. Yes, “the internet really is my thing” and I love every second of it. What’s next? I can say a new Twittershizzle, and plans for international versions of this type of event are uttered, so we’ll see where we stand, tomorrow, next month, next year. And never forget that it’s you, it’s me, it’s us all together making fabulous things happen again and again, sometimes failing miserably, but always creating something beautiful. I hope this will come across on television as bright as I feel it now.

Of course most of the postings about Twittershizzle are in Dutch, but you can search by Hashtag if you’d like and pictures can be found here or here. A nice linkdump with even more and some (Dutch spoken) videos is here on Mark Hulstein’s blog.

Whenever people asked what it was that I meant by “doing Social Research”, I could talk passionately for an hour. But sometimes it became apparent that a more structured approach was needed. After all, speaking in a passionate way about something you have in your mind might not always get the message across in a clear way. Thus I developed a way of structuring my talks.

I think my main argument for both how Social Research is possible and why it could be useful can be summarized in three main points. I’ve used these three points from then onwards to structure my approach when talking about this issue, which seems to work fine for me now. I’ve made a slide show based on these three main points, which may be nice to share with you here.

First of all of course my three points; these are:

• Explain survey based research; why are we used to it and why are we using it. Is this type of research flawless, does it have any shortcomings?
• The future of research is not about presenting you with the crowd, it’s about presenting you with their opinions. Social research makes it possible to tap right into opinions instead of people.
• We have to set up Research and show it is not only possible, but that it works. Do not wait for demand, be the unique company that can supply this extra knowledge and, in a way, create the demand.

Of course presenting you with this slideshow without me talking might seem a bit useless, but I think you can gather some information from it anyway. And besides; I’m always willing to give ‘a talk’ about this, of course.

CC Photo at the start of this article: Matthew Bowden
The nice picture of me on the fields of HAR2009 at the end of the slideshow, was made by Anne Helmond.

The question “do you deserve your following” might sound a bit odd. After all, if it is a followerbase like on twitter that you have, people have the option to unfollow you once they feel mistreated. Nevertheless it is a good thing to stop and think about how you treat the people that follow you online. Yes, of course there might be real life friends and other contacts represented in your following, but quite often posts on how to deal with your following tend to lean towards “what do you get from it”  side.

Thus I thought it was nice to come across this blogpost, asking how you really treat your followers. It’s a sad thing really, that posts like these have to be made, but I do think they are necessary, even though the answer to what a “good way” to treat them is migth be easy.

The answer I think really is quite simple. Even though I’m not religious I’d like to quote from the Bible for some guidance to basic etiquette:

Do to others as you would have them do to you
Luke 6:31

Yes, this old piece of wisdom still holds value, especially on the web. As Garret points out in his post; you’re not dealing with contacts (or just followers, for that matter) you are dealing with real people. As said;  I think it is a bit sad we have to think about how we should treat other people, but fortunately there are blogposts like these to remind us just a little.

Not just sometimes, but quite often, new media really is that simple. Hold on for just a moment and think about older, every examples of how to deal with people, products or anything else and you will see that even new things might rely on old principles.