Danny Brown

podcaster - author - creator

Archives for 2012

Sunday Shorts – The Facebook Addiction Edition

It’s the largest social network in the world, with almost 1 billion users. It’s (arguably) the de facto standard when people think social media. It’s the network (again, arguably) that any other achieves to be when launching.

Simply put, Facebook has instilled itself in our culture like no other platform has, or probably will.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that for some Facebook has become an addiction. For example:

  • 32% of users feel guilty for rejecting friend requests.
  • Two boys broke into CNN headquarters to check their Facebook status.
  • Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other website.

When a network becomes second nature in the way Facebook does, it says a lot about us and our reliance on technology. And it’s not necessarily a good thing, especially as Facebook looks to increase its stickiness factor following its recent IPO.

Check out the infographic below for more stats and information – then be honest in the comments and let us know if you’d class yourself as a Facebook addict.

Facebook Addiction Infographic

Three Reasons Menshn May Be a Non-Starter

menshn talk on topic

I caught this story on the BBC website earlier this week, about new microblogging site menshn, set up to rival Twitter.

Created by UK politician Louise Mensch, the goal is simple. In Mensch’s own words:

“Whereas Twitter is not organised around topics, on menshn you have a permanent place to go online to talk about the things you’re most interested in.”

Her partner in the venture, Luke Bozier, offers even more reasons why they created menshn.

With all the great political forums out there, we noticed that there was no place to talk about politics live. Whereas Twitter is not organised around topics, on menshn you have a permanent place to go online to talk about the things you’re most interested in.

Essentially, what they’re saying is that Twitter is frustrating because there’s no way to keep conversations on topic, hence the need for menshn.

Except there’s not. Here are three reasons why.

Twitter Hashtags

The simplest and easiest way to separate discussions and topics on Twitter is through the use of hashtags, or the little # symbol. Placed at the end of the tweet, it allows Twitter’s search function to just list tweets about that topic, and that topic alone.

Yes, you’ll get the occasional spammer jumping in promoting their crud, but for the most part, hashtags work really well. And it’s on that “frustrating service” Mensch is on about in her reasoning.

As for there not being any place to “talk live” about politics, both Mensch and Bozier can check out these political chats on Twitter: #fem2, #foiachat or #govchat.

CoverItLive

Another great option, and one I’ve used several times for live blogging and discussions, is CoverItLive.

Around since 2007, CoverItLive offers a host of solutions for your specific live discussion/blogging needs, as well as much more. Three of the ways CoverItLive negate Mensch’s concerns are:

  • Rich media and fully moderated host rooms for live blogging and chats, with branding available to make it a true personal topic.
  • Interactive content updates, with streams and comments from Facebook and Twitter (amongst others).
  • Community building through personalization, ensuring every topic attendee feels they’re being heard and offering something of value.

If both Mensch and Crozier want to really discuss the topics they want to, in a targeted way, and they feel Twitter hashtags won’t work, CoverItLive would have them covered (no pun intended).

Livefyre Comments

It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of the Livefyre comments system. Not only is it the best commenting platform around (for me, anyhoo), it’s also one of the most interactive systems around, and perfect for live Question and Answer sessions.

I’ve ran three examples of that interactivity here, with live Q&A’s featuring David Siteman Garland, Geoff Livingston and Erika Napoletano.

All three chats were centred around a specific topic – smart branding, marketing’s challenges in this digital-led age, and personal branding success through doing unpopular things.

Each chat was a huge success. Lasting roughly one hour, there were over 200 comments on each post, and each comment was essentially a question from attendees, that was answered in return by the “panelist”.

I have a few more specials coming soon, with even more interactivity – and, again, Liveyfre and they way it’s a true conversation platform would negate the need for menshn.

The Deal with menshn?

With these three examples alone, the need for menshn disappears – or, at the very least, seems less valid.

Now, it may be that it offers private chat options – but that can be done by CoverItLive and Livefyre (you could make the blog post password-protected). And there’s no platform that’s as “live” as Twitter when it comes to instant chats (Livefyre too).

So, I’m wondering where the benefit is for using menshn? It’s only available in the U.S. right now, so it’s difficult to gauge. But, from the reasons given by its creators, it seems to be something where there’s no real need for it in the first place.

I guess time will tell…

Related articles

Addressing the Pain Points of Social Media for Small to Medium Business Owners (Video)

While social media use is beginning to see a healthy increase in small business users, there are still many gaps that need to be plugged when it comes to how that use is being strategic.

For most small businesses, the main use of social media was for company awareness in the marketplace. Additionally, customer acquisition is another factor that business owners want to see, but perhaps don’t know how to actually build a strategy around this.

At Jugnoo, one of the ways we’re looking to help these business owners (as well as mid-market customers) is through education, and providing simple toolsets and “hand-holding” along the way (Ken Mueller described us perfectly as a “social media Swiss Army Knife” in a recent post).

This video below – with questions from leading PR practitioner and author Deirdre Breakenridge – shares some of our beliefs and goals for our users, as well as examples of small businesses that are succeeding in social media, and how they’re doing it.

Hopefully it’s useful to you (even with the scary still picture!), and if you’re interested in checking out the Jugnoo platform, you can sign up for the beta here.

Cheers!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAhNmN1BsHs[/youtube]

Related articles

Sunday Shorts – Being Strategic About Social Media Edition

Two years after social media really hit the mainstream, we’re still seeing people and companies fail to understand its importance and benefits.

The soundbites still doing the round are telling:

  • What’s the ROI of social media?
  • Why should I care?
  • Why do I need strategy when I can have a high Klout score instead?

These are just some examples – there are countless others, and they all point to a lack of education, understanding, explaining, etc.

Which is why this presentation from Richard Becker is probably one of the best I’ve seen, period, on what social media is and how it can play into your strategy. This quote alone sums up the issue perfectly:

The fundamental challenge for most organizations is that social media is one environment where messages work on a one-to-many, one-to-some, and one-to-one scale across multiple technologies at the same time in real time, but most communication-related professionals do not have this experience.

From personal experience, this is definitely one of the biggest reasons social media continues to be misunderstood by, and fails to bring success to, so many businesses.

Richard’s presentation offers a lot of the answers to the question of “why social media?”.

Enjoy. Oh, and if you want more smart stuff like this on a regular basis, make sure you subscribe to Richard’s blog – you won’t be disappointed.

Integrating Social Into Strategic Communication

A Special Friday Thank You from @JugnooMe to @HootSuite

They say “imitation” is the sincerest form of flattery – in which case, Jugnoo would love to thank our friends over at HootSuite.

Back in April, we came out of closed beta and opened up our platform to 1,000 users in an open beta. To celebrate this jump in status, we created a video in-house that shared an example of one of our users, the Bandit Coffee Group in Toronto.

The video showed how owner Kirk used Jugnoo to be effective on social media – connecting with customers and promoting offers – while still doing all their day-to-day business. Here’s the video below.


Simple. Fun. Clear.

Yesterday, social media dashboard folks HootSuite released a video that “…illustrates just how simple and useful social media can be.”

It uses an example of a bread and coffee place and how the owner connects with customers and promotes offers. Here’s the HootSuite video below:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/43914561[/vimeo]
It’s also simple. Fun. Clear. And the tune is jaunty!

So we’d just like to say thanks, HootSuite – great job and we appreciate the homage! 😉

In fact, we were so enamoured by the video, we sent these cupcakes to Hootsuite?s Vancouver offices ? hope you enjoyed, guys!

Thank you cupcakes from Jugnoo to HootSuite

This post also appears on the Jugnoo blog.