Grapevine Consulting

When i lived in Italy I visited the Benedictine monastery in Subiaco. It’s built around a cave where St Benedict supposedly lived in solitude for three years fed by a shepherd or monk (I’ve heard both versions) who lowered a basket of food down at intervals. The cave is surprisingly peacefully and, depending on your temperament, kind of appealing.

My positive response to the environment demonstrated that people feel different degrees of being intro- or extroverted and it’s something that crops up in questions when I run social media training sessions: who are ‘these people’ ie bloggers, tweeters, social networkers et al and why do *they* feel so comfortable broadcasting their lives?

I’m not sure I know the answer. At a basic level, once you and your friends start using something like Facebook it becomes more standardised and natural, you find yourself adding more personal updates, posting photos etc.

But honestly I still feel a bit like a social media “observer” using tools like this blog and Twitter to engage with my community from professional more than personal desires. As a pretty private person being publicly online makes me feel exposed and I contemplate deleting my accounts to run away to my Benedict’s cave. (Although I wonder if after 30 mins there I’d discover a compulsion to tweet “sitting in cave waiting for @Romanus to stop by with the food basket”).

(more…)

Ever been out of work and had the old stat 6 of 10 jobs are not advertised quoted at you? It used to not feel  true but social media is starting to show that stat in action.

Over the past few months I’ve seen:

• BIMA recruiting for a PR via Twitter
• ShinyRed recruited a grad placement via The Official Facebook Public Relations Group
• Jobs sent out via my contacts on LinkedIn
• PRBlogger advertising a digital AE via his blog

Those are just the ones I can think of right now. Ignoring the obvious “what if they see my drunken pics on Facebook/MySpace”  hype which hopefully everyone has a handle on now, I’m wondering if social media communities are going to replace the recruitment agency?

Social media just provides the tools to tap into your own or others’ networks which were harder to mass broadcast to before Web 2.0 technologies.

Working your community:

(more…)

I don’t think I’ve put podcasting high enough on my radar. Part of the problem is that I’m not someone who listens to the radio, but I realise I’m in the minority with 51% of people identifying themselves as regular listeners. So, are podcasts just a fad? Will voice just be surpassed by video or vodcasting?

On the video front, while growth in the digital space is rapid I reckon the desire for audio only will always remain. It’s a similar behaviour to choosing to put on a CD or watching music videos. Sometimes you just want to listen to something. 

There’s great growth potential for podcasting. Radio has been an enduring medium, even with the advent of digital technologies, and I see the podcast as simply providing a form of “on-demand radio”. Uptake may be slow, but awareness is growing, suggesting that podcasting suffers from the same challenges as on-demand TV services; if good content exists, it’ll just take time to ensure the delivery model is in place and help the consumer adapt.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post which picked up on Steve Rubel’s assertion that certain Web 2.0 jobs are on the decline. He’s now written a follow-up post looking at which digital jobs will be on the rise.

To prove his point on the importance of a Chief Customer Experience Officer he’s set up a google search demonstrating how customer service is paramount to managing online repuations.

For fun I typed in the universally griped about British Gas; here’s some telling results from the first page:

(more…)

User generated product and service reviews, particularly regarding going out and travel, seem to be a growth area right now in social media. But with a range of communities springing up across niche and general areas like Trip Advisor, TrustedPlaces, and Epinions how do brands get users commit to commit to their community and remain engaged? And what are the opportunities & challenges for these types of sites?

I posed some questions to Rob Hinchcliffe, Community Manager for Qype who position themselves as a ‘local reviews site’. I’ve been spending a bit of time recently attending their sponsored events, drinking their free bar and wondering how it’s all going for them.

(more…)

As a fan of chocolate and beer I was very happy to go over to Brussels last week to spend more time getting to know the social media monitoring company Attentio and attend the Emakina Academy workshop about Social Media Marketing - PR in the Web 2.0 era.

As one who’s often talking about these trends myself it was nice to see how someone else presents a case for PR utilisation of social media and it encapsulated very powerfully that people are having conversations around your brand right now. The content they create, whether good or bad, stays in search engines forever.

Charles Liebert David Rademaker from Emakina gave a compelling presentation setting out to update the old golden rules of PR (as summarised by Leo Burnett) and created a new set of PR 2.0 rules

1. Make it relevant
2. Make it participative
3. Make it multichannel
4. Make it creative
5. Make it interactive
6. Make it viral

Charles Liebert also showed some great examples of the agency’s projects which demonstrated these points and I was really impressed with how they seem to be putting their money where their mouth is - a recent award win was well deserved.

The theme which summarised the day was social media PR is not just about cultivating a brand online but also providing brand guardianship.

Has anyone read the book The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen? I’m thinking about checking it out, would love to hear recommendations.

I’ve recently chatted to friends and family about web applications they’re trying out. It got me thinking – are web brands thinking enough about end users?

Assuming most web brands are aiming for mass consumer take-up I’m not convinced they’re ensuring the market can use, and share, their product.

The Beta process is great in that it enables valuable feedback to refine a product but I think taking it to the next stage of usability is where you create a “killer app”.

There are a host of web applications doing similar things. Becoming the market leader and achieving much desired word-of-mouth buzz is reliant on the user experience.

(more…)

The Blog Herald reports on Trackur a new tool to help you manage your online reputation. The atricle ponders whether the cost, at $88 p/m, is a little prohibitive but if it does what it’s meant to I don’t think that’s too much of an issue.

I checked out the demo and the first thing that struck me was that there was no way of seeing at a glance whether you or your product were being spoken about in reverential tones or if a blogger is ‘about to flush [your reputation] down the toilet’ to quote the slightly odd text on the website.

While the tool itself seems to look well put together, easy to use and good at filtering results, if you’re seriously monitoring online reputation, especially on a large scale, this ability to get a feel for the trends of online coverage is important. The demo highlights this by performing a search for Google which returns over 2000 results for one day alone. How are you supposed to cut through all the “so, I did a quick Google search” mentions and find out if any issues are building without reading all of those entries?

I know this technology is not easy to create or 100% accurate but I’ve seen this type of tone indicator in practise with Attentio’s social media monitoring tool and it’s hard to imagine not having that capability.