Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

A couple of months ago, I was in H&R Block filing my late father’s taxes. It was late April, and the tax deadline here in Canada is April 30, so you can imagine the scene. If not, allow me to paint it for you: chaotic, depressing yet hilarious, and nobody from H&R Block was happy to be doing their job. The manager, who was no older than 25 and, for what it’s worth, stereotypically gay, told one person who complained about the price of her tax return, that he wouldn’t pay that much to get his taxes done here and would absolutely go elsewhere, if not for the fact that he was the manager on duty. This might get him in trouble, but I believe his name was Tyler. Sorry Tyler.

Another woman, whom I had been in to meet with two days earlier about my late father’s tax return only to have her show me the door when I wasn’t able to produce legal documents authorizing me as the executor of my father’s will (which didn’t exist because my dear old dad died without a will, or an executor, or anything else for that matter) and after explaining the situation to her, she still turned me away. Imagine Kelly Kippur from “The Office”, and suck every ounce of life and personality out of her—voila. On this particular day, Tyler the manager told her that her next customer was ready, to which she replied something to the effect of “I need to go to the washroom”, and left. Somewhere between five and ten minutes later she returned to her workstation, and immediately turned around to leave again while her customer waited. When asked where she was going by her boss, she snapped back at him “I haven’t been to the washroom yet!” even though she had just been out of the office for an extended period of time. She eventually came back from the washroom. Fortunately, I was not the person waiting on her.

The person I was waiting for was an older woman. I didn’t have an appointment, but I was next in line to meet with her. She was late taking her lunch, and unfortunately had to take it while I waited for her to return. She spent her lunch hour outside the “office” (I use the word “office” loosely—it’s poorly lit, has no windows, and is located on the top floor of The Bay at Yonge and Bloor in Toronto, shoved into a glorified crawl space at the far end of a cafeteria that I doubt few know exists), which I would have no problem with if she hadn’t spent half of that hour meeting with a client about a tax return while I waited. Yes, she worked through her lunch (good) but met with someone else while I waited not just within earshot but in plain sight nearby (very bad).

So after waiting about two hours and seeing all of this, plus listening to Tyler take phone calls and watching H&R Block co-workers attempt to co-exist, I had every reason to tweet the following:

I’m at H&R Block, by far the most hilarious screwed up workplace I’ve encountered in a long time

I thought absolutely nothing of it and continued waiting. That was at 3:07 p.m. At 3:30 p.m. I received an email from H&R Block titled “H&R Block Customer Support”, and it reads as follows:

Good Afternoon,

Thank you for contacting H&R Block’s Customer Support.

We were sorry to read that the service you received did not appear to meet your expectations.

We have escalated this concern to the District Manager in order to have your concern further investigated.  Please trust that your satisfaction in our product and services is of the utmost importance to us at H&R Block, and that you will be contacted by a local resource within 2 business days.

We have started a file for your concern, for tracking purposes your reference number is XXXXXXX. Please keep this number and refer to it should there be a need for any future correspondence.

Thank you for choosing H&R Block for your tax requirements and providing us with the opportunity to ensure that our service does meet your expectations.

Have a nice day.

Customer Support Team
H&R Block Canada

My first reaction was confusion. My post on Twitter didn’t even come to my mind, so I didn’t know what this e-mail was regarding. Obviously, I asked Tyler because I thought he might be able to explain it since there was a reference number quoted. Tyler was helpful and picked up the phone to find out more info, but the person on the other line couldn’t give him any information because it was a matter for the district manager and he wasn’t privy to that information. He actually told me it was a big deal and he would be sure to hear about it soon—and he didn’t mean that in a good way. I still didn’t have a clue why I had been contacted by customer service. I sat down, spent at least 15 minutes thinking it over, and slowly realized what had happened. That’s when I stopped talking to Tyler and started to worry.

I needed to get my late father’s taxes done. I didn’t have a clue how to file for a deceased person, especially one without anything more than a death certificate and a T4 slip. I had waited for several hours. I was at the mercy of H&R Block, and I had just told the store manager that I had been contacted by customer service about a complaint that I knew nothing about.

You may be saying, “Chris, how could you not have figured out in today’s uber-connected world that H&R Block was e-mailing you about your tweet because they monitor social media?” and that’s fair. In my defence, I’m not a genius. Still, for H&R Block to file a complaint, escalate it to the district manager, and notify me of it all before I even had the chance to leave H&R Block’s office? That’s fast—and because my tweet could have upset any number of people who work in that office, I say H&R Block reacted too fast. YES, TOO FAST. Tyler wasn’t able to learn why I had received the email from customer service over the phone right away, but he soon learned (while I continued waiting) that my complaint came from “one of those internet sites like Twitter or Facebook”. Can you imagine how uncomfortable it made me feel to sit there waiting for service from his staff thinking that at any moment he could find out that I said his office was “hilariously screwed up”?

In the end, I sat down with the woman I had waited a few hours to see, and she filed my taxes in minutes. Tyler even gave me a discount for waiting so long. In the end, I had a good experience with H&R Block at the store level because I understand that everyone is under pressure during tax season. Would I take my tweet back? Of course not, but H&R Block’s customer service did the company a disservice by contacting me and putting me in the uncomfortable position they did. I’m sure there’s a lot to be said about privacy and social media monitoring in this example, but I think I’ve said enough for one blog post. I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments if you have any.

Oh and by the way, I never did hear from H&R Block, even though they promised to contact me within two business days.

Note: this post has some spoilers about Ender’s Game, so if you haven’t read it yet, don’t read this post. Just go out and buy it and read it, because it’s amazing. But don’t take my word for it;  I mean, the 1986 Hugo Award and 1984 Nebula Award are hard to argue with. It’s not even that long of a book. You can probably finish it in a lazy summer afternoon at the cottage, if you put down your iPhone for long enough. You can buy it on Amazon right now for, like, seven bucks.

This weekend, I finished re-reading Ender’s Game for the first time since I originally read it ten years ago and was blown away by how well the author, Orson Scott Card, predicted the future from the early 80s.

I say the early 80s, but it could have been earlier. Card’s first version was published as a story in a science fiction magazine in 1977. He later fleshed this out to a full-fledged novel in 1985 (according to the copyright information in my copy of the book), and made some more minor changes in 1991.

And when I’m talking about how Card predicted the future, I’m not talking about Ender’s Desk (which is described exactly like an iPad) or even the Ansible, a device capable of near-instantaneous communication over vast distances (not that far off, really). I’m talking about how he predicted the rise of blogging and the influence social media can have over culture and politics.

While most of the plot of the book follows young Ender Wiggin, youngest of three children, as he goes to Battle School at the age of six to learn how to be the commander of a fleet to fight invading aliens, a sub-plot involves how his sociopathic, but brilliant, brother Peter, and more empathetic, but equally brilliant, sister Valentine, are left home on earth.

Under the leadership of Peter, the two of them start contributing to “forums” on the “nets” using pseudonyms, or characters:

“They began composing debates for their characters. Valentine would prepare an opening statement, and Peter would invent a throwaway name to answer her. His answer would be intelligent, and the debate would be lively, lots of clever invective and good political rhetoric. Valentine had a knack for alliteration that made her phrases memorable. Then they would enter the debate into the network, separated by a reasonable amount of time, as if they were actually making them up on the spot. Sometimes a few other netters would interpose comments, but Peter and Val would usually ignore them or change their own comments only slightly to accommodate what had been said.”

The next paragraph describes how Peter tracked how their work was being read and shared, and reads almost like a description of media monitoring in 2010.

As the two keep writing, their influence grows, their articles get syndicated, and they begin to get involved in serious policy discussions. Since its all online, no one knows that it is actually just two genius children.

Implausible? Yes. Impossible? No.

While I doubt that our global politics are being played like a game of chess by a couple of kids, I think Orson Scott Card’s prediction of the way an ordinary citizen can get involved via the internet and become a serious, real-world influence is a great bit of future-casting.

Reasons like that are why I love reading science-fiction, be it old-school Heinlein and Asimov, 80s cyberpunk, or the post-human stuff that’s all the rage these days. Science fiction is a framework for thinking about what could happen; it’s a way of looking forward to finding out who is going to be right.

Have you read Ender’s Game? Were Peter and Valentine the original bloggers?

Last week, I gave a presentation at Centennial College’s Talk Is Cheap unconference. The talk was Music Blogging: Posting, Pitching and PR, and if that sounds familiar, its because I wrote a blog post with the same title a few months ago.

I’ve gone to #TalkIsCheap for the past few years, and I’ve always had a great time. I think it’s one of the better social media events in Toronto these days, and the organizers deserve a round of applause. (Thanks for letting me speak!)

The gist of my talk was that as much as I enjoy writing the occasional post here on BlogCampaigning, I don’t really like writing about PR, and I don’t like reading about PR and and communications. By the informal polls I did of the audience, it seems like most people agreed with me. (I mean, c’mon: do you REALLY enjoy reading about PR and communications?)

I went on to talk about how much more I enjoyed writing about electronic music and science fiction for my other blog, and how doing that has taught me way more about PR and online communications than writing posts for BlogCampaigning.

While I didn’t get too deep into the details of music blogging, I did talk about some of things I’d learned about PR from my other blog:

1. Your pitches don’t have to be personalized – I feel like PR and communications pros who blog are the only ones who insist on pitches being personalized. The rest of the blogging world will post about something if they feel its relevant to their audience. Personalized pitches can help, but they aren’t necessary.

2. Your pitches should be well targeted – if they aren’t, you’re just wasting everyone’s time. When talking about this, I used an example of a PR person that sent me an album to review for my music blog. I normally only blog about electronic music, but the album was folk guitar. I’m going to ignore every e-mail I get from that PR person from now on, because I’ll just assume it is the same type of music.

3. Don’t send fancy HTML emails – once again, you’re wasting everyone’s time. They don’t show up well on mobile devices, Outlook frequently blocks the images and even Yahoo! and Gmail don’t seem to like them.

4. Don’t follow up – it just pisses people off. While admittedly I’ve gotten some great coverage out of following up with a journalist, and have also posted something just because some guy followed up so often that I started to feel guilty, nobody feels good about a PR pitch being followed up. It’s one of those things that everyone just feels awkward about. In the case where you have a good relationship with a journalist or a blogger, then its probably alright to follow up because you’ll know when it is appropriate. As someone else commented during my presentation, if you’re pitches are well targeted then you probably shouldn’t have to do a lot of follow-up.

In the end, I tried to encourage the audience to start a blog about something they care about. For example, if they want to work in PR for one of the big car companies, they should start a blog about cars. If they want to work in fashion PR, they should start a fashion blog. Seeing the world in the eyes of an online journalist will be far more valuable than writing the occasional post about something like the “intersection of PR and social media”.

So what do you think—should students blog about their thoughts on the PR industry, or should they be blogging about something they care about?

Have you started a blog, and given up after a while because it was about something you weren’t interested in?

-Parker

Talking with my friend Mike Kennedy recently, I realized that social media have invaded my job. My personal and professional lives are colliding!

Blogging and reading blogs have become part of my job description, and there are small Twitter and Facebook communities among my co-workers (including me) and higher-ups. I talk to my boss on Twitter—weird. These things used to be solely personal pursuits—stuff for friends and family. Now I do them at work? Yuck!?

I’m sure this is nothing new to many of BlogCampaigning’s readers, but it was a bit of a shock to me, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I’m happy that my company has started a blog and that I get to write for it. I think it’s great that we’re actively, if tentatively, pursuing a social media strategy. I’ve even written some posts on how social media affects the workplace (we’re in human resources publishing, so you know).

I think my surprise arises from an artificial barrier that I had built dividing The Internet and its Many Diversions and Modes of Communication including Social Media, from E-Mail and Proprietary Closed Systems and their Singular Purpose of Doing My Job. What I mean is that I previously thought The Internet was for leisure, and one only used it occasionally for work. But in an instant, I recognized that this was far from the truth, and I was thus in some sort of work-leisure limbo. (It’s clear now that this realization was building for some time.)

So what now!?

I don’t really have a problem with social media entering my job. In hindsight, that was clearly inevitable. This episode has just made me realize that I will now have to deal with all of the mixed-up things that come next: delineating work time from leisure; maintaining a professional web presence; managing the time I am working…

I guess the question is: does this situation even really change anything?

Sure, that barrier has fallen down, but does that mean my behaviour or life will change? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

— Update —

I think I might have figured it out. The thing is, I already spend a lot time at the computer; I don’t like that it has intruded into so many daily functions. If I want to read the news, I go to my computer. If I want to see what my friends are up to or talk to them, I go to my computer. If I want to listen to music or look at photos—computer. If I want to write—computer. Recipes, directions, phone calls, videos, communication… You can probably guess that I don’t have a Blackberry or iPhone or some other piece of fancy portable gear. Maybe that’s my trouble but I’m not sure.

I have two problems with spending so much time at my computer: guilt and headaches. On the one hand, it just doesn’t feel right staring at a digital screen for as long as I do each day; on the other, I feel unhealthy doing it. You could say, “Get a Wii Fit!” But I’m pretty sure that’s missing the point. I want to do all of those leisure activities, but I don’t want to sit in one spot all day, staring into the bright light, to do them. I want to leave my house!

So I wonder, what is the solution? Am I just waiting for the right technology to come along to allow me to do all of the things I want to without feeling like I’m attached to a machine? Do I want to give up technology altogether? Let me tell you when summer comes around.

A few months ago, I gave a presentation as part of the Canadian Institute’s Managing Social Media Conference titled “Everything I Need To Know About Social Media I Learned From The Globe and Mail.”

A few weeks ago, the good folks from the Canadian Institute were kind enough to give me that presentation in video format so that I could share it with my readers.

I pretty much walked straight from the presentation to a job interview at MAVERICK PR, where I now work.

For more on this presentation (including my explanatory notes and the slides), please see this post or visit ParkerMason.ca/Globe

Anyways, it looks like the Canadian Institute has another Managing Social Media conference coming up in Calgary in March. I’m sure it will be good, so if you’re in town you should check it out.

-Parker

PS: You should totally follow BlogCampaigning on Twitter. It is twice as easy as RSS, and all the cool kids are doing it.

I’ve been using Twitter now for a few months, and I still have little idea of it’s purpose—or if it even has one. At it’s base, Twitter is a simple way to share and receive bits of information, the modern currency. It’s like a data marketplace—a microcosm of the internet itself, and more manageable than the world wide web. But I like that it has undefined boundaries, and that users have come up with new uses for it.

I don’t go out of my way to read about Twitter’s development on technology blogs or whatever. I have my interests (technology and internet culture among them), and I read about them semi-regularly; but I don’t have the time or the interest to consume or sort through all of the blather, opinion, and predictions about something like Twitter, which I would prefer to explore myself.

That said, here are a few of the ways in which Twitter has changed my internet and information consumption behaviour.

1. Interest-targeted information
I never had a selection of specific blogs that I would visit regularly to find news on a certain topic. I retrieved stuff from the internet mostly via news sites (e.g., TheStar.com), search engines, and aggregators (e.g., Digg and Reddit), each of which serves a particular purpose for finding information. Google news was my main news source for a brief while a couple of years ago. I also began using Google Reader to follow with pitiful—make that pathetic—regularity my friends’ blogs.

These all might have their own purposes, but I found them inefficient because they forced me to visit a website and scan through bits of info for what I wanted to read. I had heard of RSS feeds, which could send interesting links directly to a central location, such as your e-mail or a web application like Google Reader, but I was too lazy to bother figuring it out, and besides, Facebook had captured most of my internet attention; and with Facebook, I could share information as well as receive it.

This was all before Twitter. I looked at Twitter last year some time and thought, like just about everyone else on the planet (that’s facetious western arrogance, by the way): “What is this nonsense? Who cares about what everybody/nobody has to say about their nonsense lives?” I hardly realized that millions were already paying attention to others’ nonsense on Facebook all day long. But Twitter just seemed too simple and pointless: why would anyone actually want to know about what others were doing or, you know, thought about stuff?

Well, I was wrong. I mean, I still don’t care about what most people are doing or what they think about stuff—my use of Twitter has actually made this abundantly clear. I also note that recently (even before Twitter) I’ve been using Facebook far less than in the past. The thing is, now I can “follow” “twitterers” who “tweet” information in which I am interested, as well as my friends—those who are currently taking advantage of the service—and all of that information goes to one central place, where I can scan it with far greater ease than before.

For example, I used to visit Digg, which aggregates user-submitted stories from the web, placing the top stories (by users’ votes) on the “front page”. This is incredibly useful, but the content is still all over the place. Current events and world politics are combined in an unholy mixture with pictures of cute animals, celebrity “news” and UFO and crop circle sightings, and eventually, I found myself disillusioned with sifting through all of the stuff I wasn’t interested in. As for friends’ blogs, as I mentioned, I simply didn’t look at them very often, probably because I was spending my online time scanning Digg.

Twitter allows me to narrow the scope of my information retrieval. I follow certain news sources and blogs that mainly focus on local (i.e., Toronto) news, for example:

Torontoist for general Toronto news, mostly written by local independent journalists
BlogTO for more general news
NOW Magazine for the “alternative” news
Urban Toronto) for a great look at Toronto’s history and future

Some of my other interests are satisfied via:

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
Tech news, commonly involving Google at myunblinkingeye
News about all the good food we produce in Ontario from Foodland Ontario

I follow friends (including the writers of BlogCampaigning):

Justin Broadbent, a terrific artist, illustrator, photographer, and videographer
Angie Johnson, fashion designer and Montréal boutique owner extraordinaire
Tyson Bodnarchuk, another terrific artist and Montréal boutique owner extraordinaire

And I even follow the odd celebrity:
Neil Gaiman, writer of fantasy and science fiction
Rainn Wilson (kind of), via his “big questions” blog, Soul Pancake

I could go on, but I fear that I’m already pushing the boundaries of attention, and will raise the ire of my fellow blogcampaigners with my first post.

So, to wrap up: maybe you’re not an information junkie to the extent that I am, but if you use the internet to seek useful or interesting information for personal or professional use, and you find you’re not satisfied with your current methods, I recommend you give Twitter a try. It’s not difficult to understand and use, and it should be even easier for people who are already somewhat social-media savvy.

Let me know if you’ve got questions. I probably won’t be able to answer them, but I’d like to hear them!

Upcoming:
Twitter as human-powered search engine—the new (better) Google!?
Twitter as hyper-modern communication tool—not just for nerds!

Before embarking on ANY kind of communications campaign, you should know the audience you’re trying to reach.

Yeah, there are a ton of great sites out there that would be neat to reach out to. But if your audience isn’t there, what is the point? According to a recent post on Business Insider, 69% of adults don’t really know what Twitter is. Unless your audience is part of the 31% that does understand and use the service, you are probably better of focusing your effort elsewhere.

Similarly, a recent post on TechCrunch about Friendster, shows that the social networking site we North Americans might have thought of as dead is still alive and well over there. Any kind of marketing campaigning focusing on people in that area of speakers of languages from there might be better off focusing their efforts on Friendster than on Facebook.

Not only is it a good idea to know your audience in order to know where they are looking, but it will also help give you an idea of what they are looking for. To grossly simplify things, someone trying to reach college students might be better off with a series of entertaining online videos, whereas someone trying to reach purchasers at businesses might be better off providing their audience with printable, fact-filled PDFs.

-Parker

Twitter is the RSS dream made real. (I repeated the headline here because I’m feeling pretty self-satisfied with having written it.)

If you’re reading this post, you’re probably pretty hip to the RSS scene (I know that the majority of BlogCampaigning’s readers read it via RSS). But you’re not mainstream—you’re probably a PR Pro with a Penchant for Social Media, one of my Blogging Brethren, a Conference-Attending Corporate Communicator

RSS never really caught on because even the simplest analogies made it sound complicated. I mean, between Rich Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication people can’t even seem to agree on what it stands for.

But Twitter… people seem to instantly grasp the concept of Twitter. They understand the idea that if they “follow” an account, they get updates from that account. No messing around with moving the subscription URL to your RSS reader.

Professional communicators should always try and make it as easy as possible for people to access their message, or at least make it possible for their audience to access the message in the manner they prefer.

While some people might frown upon feed-based Twitter accounts, I’m all for them and for that reason I’ve set up Twitter.com/BlogCampaigning. As I feel fewer and fewer people are checking their RSS readers and moving more towards their Tweetdecks, Twitter homepages and Twhirls, I want to make sure they’re still able to easily access the freshest BlogCampaigning posts. Hardcore BlogCampaigning fans probably don’t want to be bothered with the daily chatter that fills my personal Twitter account—they just want the hottest news from the BlogCampaigning team.

Even if you don’t want to follow the BlogCampaigning Twitter feed, you can still subscribe by email, RSS or even access the page directly (which, in case you haven’t noticed, went through a redesign recently).

Applied to the greater world of PR, don’t limit your campaigns to just a Facebook group, just a news release directed at traditional media, or just a Twitter account. Except in probably very unique cases, making your message accessible in only one place probably won’t result in much success.

How do you feel about feed-based Twitter accounts? Is there a better way we can be getting our news out?

-Parker

PS: Don’t forget to follow @BlogCampaigning!

The preface:

The claim resurfaces regularly. I’ve written about it; others have written about it: in terms of internet and social media, Germany lags behind.

ReadWriteWeb just published an interview with Marcel Weiß, the editor of Netzwertig.com—one of Germany’s most popular blogs—in which he explains that Germany is at least five years behind the U.S. when it comes to social media and its adoption by a larger part of society. Blogs are still considered to be suspect by a large part of the German public and have very little influence, and social news sites and aggregators attract very little attention.

He goes on to explain that

[B]logging and social media adoption in Germany is far behind similar trends in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Blogs are still considered suspect and have almost no influence over local or national politics. The mainstream media still likes to describe the Internet as a dangerous place, full of malware, porn, and scammers. While regular newspapers in Germany have also started to feel the pressure from the Internet (and every major German paper has a web site), the absence of a successful Craigslist-type site in the country has given the newspapers a longer lease on life than in America.

The reasons for this are very deeply ingrained in German society. Felix Salmon offers a short and comprehensible (yet also stereotyped) overview: basically, Germany’s culture is the antithesis of what blogging is all about.

The blogosphere is fundamentally egalitarian, to the point at which the young and even the completely anonymous can become A-listers. At the same time, highly respected professors and experts often find themselves ignored, perhaps because they hedge themselves too much or are simply too boring to pay attention to. Germany, by contrast, is fundamentally hierarchical.

A bit of a generalization, but he’s close to the point. I’d say this statement rather applies to culture. The use of mass culture in Germany is quite hierarchical as it reflects power structures. I will spare you the sociology behind it (see my post about Bourdieu and social media). Just this much: in contrast to American discourses, which embrace the internet as a genuinely democratic and—thus specifically American—cultural practice, in Germany this egalitarian appeal and integrative potential is perceived as a threat to milieus (and media) which still perpetuate restricted high cultural traditions (or the “right” use of pop culture) in order to gain social capital.

Also: Germany experienced its greatest push towards modernity under the Nazis, the first party to embrace mass media for propaganda purposes in a kind of reactionary modernism, which makes the whole field… suspect.

Anyway, the result of all this is: Germany indeed does lag behind.

My Problem:

I was confronted with this fact very recently when an old high school friend of mine asked me to help him promote a movie he produced, by means of social media. The movie is in English (in fact it’s supposed to take place in the U.S.), and aims at an international audience. Here, two mindsets collided.

It had to explain what a Facebook fan page was, why we want to get a Twitter and a Flickr account, etc. Once everything was set up, the next step was to explain how everything worked. It was a social media crash course.

I suppose Twitter alone would warrant a whole night of instructions (if the other person has no idea at all): What are the basics? How do I contact people? How, why and when do I send direct messages? Wait, I can change the background? I woke up to ICQ (yes, ICQ) messages asking me why a # was in front of a tweet. And what the hell is Follow Friday?

At this stage, we didn’t even discuss the “proper” use of Twitter yet: engage in conversations, be nice and say thank you, look for Twitter users or bloggers who are interested in the romantic horror comedy splatter genre and get them to cover you… If someone does an interview or writes a review, see if the person has a Twitter account and add them… A sample conversation: “One of the singers from the soundtrack is following us.” “Did you follow her back?” “Why?”

And so it went on. I was the one who’s supposed to update the account. Andy, the director, attended the film’s premier in Montreal. Lot’s of potential there in terms of Twitter. But he had no idea about it either. So apparently it was up to me… (sitting at my office desk in Germany, writing my doctoral thesis, not really having the time to monitor any coverage of the movie). It was going to be a long way. I really hope my friend realized how to use Thwirl by now…

“BTW, it would be nice if Andy could take some pictures and could upload them on Flickr. I also installed a plug-in to display the latest Flickr uploads on the Facebook page” “Uh… he doesn’t know how to. And why do we need Flickr in the first place, I thought we could upload photos on Facebook!” “Yaaaaah, but…”

The problem was: my friend’s German mindset, not being acquainted with any social media or its principle at all, collided with the world out there.

But, to give credit were credit is due: he seemed to be learning—in terms of the basic idea at least.

While having a beer at a bar, the producer told me what kind of trailer they would produce and how they would introduce the people behind the movie in little clips; how he would ask the director to film movies with his mobile at festivals and put those on Facebook and Youtube—basically share the experience and engage people, let them become part of the project and involve them in the process of getting the whole thing started. Or as he put it “Keep zings reel!”

We were getting there. Slowly.

I invited all my friends on Facebook to become a fan of the movie, while my friend sent out an e-mail to the 150 people of the (German) movie team. All of a sudden 2/3s of our fan base came from Australia—apparently hardly anyone of the team was on Facebook!

In short: please become a fan of Must Love Death and follow us on Twitter!!

-Jens

The following post was written by Heather Morrison

At a recent IABC social sedia event last week the discussion of ‘buy in’ was brought up a number of times, from various perspectives. The question seems to be on every communicators mind – How do you convince your boss/CEO that social media is worth being involved in? How do you get buy in? How do you decrease the risks, and allay their fears.

The first question to ask is: What is their greatest fear or concern?

Costs? This is an easy one. Most social media applications have very little monetary costs associated with them. The real resource needed is time. Many companies combat this by starting small (think baby steps), and working together so that no one person feels over loaded with work.

Making a mistake? More than likely every company first entering into social media will make a few mistakes along the way (close to 50% of initial attempts will flop). But whatever happened to ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try try again’? With proper education, these initial mistakes will provide a good base for future initiatives.

Negative Feedback? There are two types of kids in every schoolyard – the kids who stand up to rumors and bullies, and those who hide from them. While those who hold their heads up might take an initial beating, they will ultimately gain more respect than those seen hiding their heads in the sand. Not everyone will agree with every opinion, post, or decision that you make. That said, people will agree and/or disagree whether you are part of the conversation or not. Social media allows companies to enter these discussions, learn from what’s being said, and provide feedback and perspective directly to their clients/prospects. It also provides an opportunity to sculpt future campaigns based on raw customer feedback.

There is far more to be afraid of by remaining disengaged and distant from your market than there is by becoming involved. You don’t want to miss the boat and let the conversation carry your brand and reputation down stream (think Motrin, Walmart, Wholefoods, Kryptonite, and Hertz). As Matthew Ingram once pointed, “you need to have a presence in social media to have a voice when you need it. Don’t try to jump in during the fire!”

Heather Morrison is an Account Executive at CNW Group and has previously written about Israel’s Use of Social Media and about Building Your Twitter Empire here on BlogCampaigning. She is @Hmorrison on Twitter.