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How To Grow Your Business Online By Planting 100,000 Seeds

Niall Harbison — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:21:17 +0000

People often ask me how we get new business. Where did the impressive client list come from in such a short period of time? The only thing I ever say is that we don’t do any of the old stuff that agencies used to do. We don’t pay for advertising of any sort. We don’t sponsor awards. We don’t go to networking events. Conferences mostly bore us to death and taking people out to lunch around here means buying them a burrito rather than an expensive restaurant. So how do you go about creating amazing word of mouth marketing for your business when you have no budget and nothing but a blank canvas to work with?

Well the first answer lies in the tools that we have at our disposal. 10 years ago a new business would have been forced to advertise or use expensive marketing. You couldn’t just talk to your potential customers online. That’s very easy to forget. Cold calling and mail shots were the norm. Creating a brand from scratch was tough and the big boys held all the cards. The small start up didn’t have a voice. Reputation, trust and word of mouth marketing were done the hard way by shaking hands, swapping business cards and getting people talking about you one on one. That’s why conferences, newspapers and mailing lists were like gold. A large captive audience that could hear your message and buy in to you. The second key thing that you have to do is to plant 100,000 seeds…

Planting 100,000 Seeds

First of all what are seeds? Seeds are conversations, blog posts, tweets, Youtube videos, links, Facebook updates or any other little seeds that you spread. They take time to create and 99% of them won’t reference your own business in any way whatsoever. The best seeds are when you help people, share their links, promote their businesses, make them laugh or give them great content. People are amazing and if you help them with one tiny little seed the chances are they’ll send back 10 times more in return. Send out 100,000 useful helpful seeds and you create amazing word of mouth marketing. You can’t plant 100,000 seeds overnight. You can’t even do it 9-5. Your whole life has to become about creating seeds. About writing helpful blog posts. About shining the light on others. You don’t pay €5000 to sponsor something and get €20,000 of business back. The world doesn’t really work like that any more.

Once your 100,000 seeds are planted you’ll see business and brand awareness come to you in ways you could never imagine. Single tweets will send you huge accounts. Leads will come from friends of friends who were passed on a useful blog post. People you’ve never met or spoken to will be recommending you to other people you’ve never met. After a while you get to a tipping point where people start to plant additional seeds for you. Even better seeds than those you could plant yourself.

They key is to never stop planting the seeds though. Stop planting them and eventually the whole thing will dry up and you’ll be back to square one. See marketing yourself isn’t hard and it’s not about broadcasting any more it’s simply about planting 100,000 seeds

Should You Only Promote Products You Love?

Niall Harbison — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:16:21 +0000

I’ve been reading the brilliant book on the left for the last couple of weeks and it’s got me thinking about marketing in general. One of the key points that David Ogilvy makes is that he only ever had 19 clients and they were all clients that he loved, he believed in all their products and he would only ever promote products that he was passionate about. Is that feasible though? In this day and age?

When you start promoting a product either as an individual or an agency you are effectively in charge of getting more people to buy that product or service. Now I am going to go out on a limb here and say the perfect karma does not exist to connect every marketeer with products they love which must mean that some of us are promoting stuff we don’t believe in. Is that right though? Should you promote something that you wouldn’t buy or use yourself and was Ogilvy right when he said that you should only promote products you love?

The picture becomes even more blurred when you are talking about start up businesses. At least with a large business they can probably afford not to have their marketing work perfectly but with a start up having a successful sales and marketing strategy might mean the difference between the life or death of the entire company. Surely it must be wrong to take money from a company when you know that their product has little or no chance of success? Maybe it’s not? Maybe if you believe you are the best in town then it only has the best chance of success with your marketing even though the product isn’t quite right?

There are many other complications including the various people within an agency. Some might love product X while others would only use product Y. Not everybody can be the founder or director of an agency and choose which products they get to work on. What if you are a brilliant marketeer within a company and you get handed a dog of a product to promote by your boss?

I don’t have all the answers to this question and it’s been bothering me for the last week. I know plenty of marketers read this blog so I’d love to hear what you have to say? Surely even though we’d all only love to work on products we absolutely love it’s only people as talented and selective as Mr Ogilvy that get to choose?

The Changing Landscape Of Social Media

Niall Harbison — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 07:02:27 +0000

Some words I have been hearing a lot in recent times in social media…acquiring, owning, recruiting and retaining. All words I’ve heard from brands, agencies and people within the industry. Buzz words. Words we are more used to hearing from old media. Not the same social media buzz words from 18 months ago like community, engaging and organic. So what has changed? Well lots of money pouring in to the industry and the arrival of large scale advertising mostly.

I suppose it is inevitable when you see how much brands are pumping in to Facebook advertising that the mentality would shift. 18 months ago people were dipping their toes in the water with small campaigns but brands now launch some products entirely through social media and if they are doing that they need to make sure it reaches a substantial audience. They are paying for that reach. Will social media just end up being called “media” in the future? Will we talk about the number of likes and followers brands have in the same way we look at TV viewers and newspaper readers 10 years ago?

The smart brands still know that the real power lies in the conversations and engaging and helping customers with things like brilliant customer service. There is however a lot of money washing around being spent on advertising. The days of building a community organically are gone for the big guys and its more about buying their way to top like it used to be with more traditional forms of media. That is why we have reached a stage where acquiring, recruiting and owning have made their way in to industry language.

The key lies somewhere in the middle. Acquire lots of loyal followers (by all means use advertising) and looking after, engaging and listening to them rather than just continuing to broadcast to them. That was the old way.

Are we learning faster, or just not there yet?

Lauren Fisher — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:59:40 +0000

Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk

There was a comment left on a post I wrote a while ago, that I just haven’t been able to shake.Where I discussed the effects that the internet was having on our behaviour, one commenter noted how we are in the ’2 year old phase’ when it comes to our online communication. We are essentially still discovering our voices, only we’re doing it in a rather loud way. I can’t help but find this fascinating. Social media is an evolving form of communication and I think it’s easy to forget just how early on in the process we are.

100,000 years

The bit that gets to me, that really gets me excited, is to put it into context to give us some perspective. Though there is debate around the exact dates, the spoken human language first emerged around 100,000 years ago, with some placing it back as far as the early stages, 1.8 million years ago. And from these very early, primitive forms of communication we have had 100,000 years to develop a whole subset of completely separate languages; one entirely indistinguishable from the next. We’ve learned rhetoric, speeches, lies and truths. We learned how to make people laugh through words. We even found a way to translate the words we were speaking, onto symbols on a piece of paper. We’ve had 100,000 years to do all this. And in less than 50 years, we’ve gone from the first internet-enabled computers, to adding your local coffee shop onto a mobile device and synching with your Twitter account to let everyone know you’re the mayor of it.

Don’t underestimate how scary this is

As a generation we’ve learned to accept the new things as standard. We won’t have had it 5 minutes, until we’re annoyed that it’s broken. But I think it’s time to take a minute, and think about the enormity of this thing called social media, this online communication that we’re currently exploring.

And we need to ask ourselves – are we just learning faster, or are we actually not there yet?

What I mean by that is, in comparison to the evolution of human language, is it the case that we’ve just got incredibly smart, incredibly quickly, or are we actually, as my commenter suggested, in the 2 year ol phase? Maybe we’re not as smart as we think we are. We all like to think of ourselves as accomplished online (well, you’re reading a blog post after all), but what if we’re actually not at all? What if we’re actually the screaming baby that’s crying because they don’t know how to explain what’s wrong with them? What if we’re not actually communicating at all? It answers a lot of questions. The fact that we’re not able to determine something like sarcasm through online communication, which we can now understand so easily through the subtleties of facial expressions or tone of voice, might be something that in 5 years time, people can’t comprehend. There could be a way of talking to someone on the other side of the world, through a screen, that we can’t even imagine yet. It’s a pretty scary thought.

Image courtesty of alex_lee2001

As intelligent as we are now, we are actually nowhere near the true capabilities of online communication, of what the internet really means to us. We’re all having a great time figuring it out, pushing the boundaries and trying new things. We have the internet and the multitude of services and technologies at our fingertips. We pick something up, we like it, we give it to someone else for them to try (but we like it back – we’re early adopters, after all), we’re upset when it doesn’t do what we want it to, and then we’re onto the next thing that’s sure to please us. It’s the same motions the toddler goes through every day with their own toys.

We’re learning, but not that quickly. We don’t even know where ‘there’ is yet.

Is there something rotten in the state of the internet?

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:35:37 +0000

Image courtesy of UltraBobban

According to Richard Dawkins, there is. Following a series of fairly hateful posts on a forum on his site, he withdrew the discussion board and posted on his blog that he felt there was “something rotten in the internet culture”. Given that one commenter said he wanted to ram a fistful of nails down his throat, you can see where he’s coming from. So does Dawkins have a point? Is there something inherently rotten in our internet culture? There are a few interesting points from this discussion that are worth looking at further.

One of the clear things that Dawkins takes issue with, and I have to side with him here, is the reference to language. He questions why there is the need for such over the top language and in a tone that he describes as sometimes ‘hysterical’. Anyone who has read the comments for pretty much any youtube video, can’t help but agree with him here. But youtube aside, which seems to have spawned it’s own subculture of inane, irrational and spiteful comments, he does also have a point when it comes to the language that’s used online. I’ve been on the receiving end of some pretty hurtful stuff myself and I’ve seen others go through worse. Sure, you eventually learn to accept it, you become almost desensitised. The thing is that this can sometimes come from people you know ‘offline’ and the tone and language used for some of their online communication can often seem like it’s coming from a different person altogether.

Hiding behind the wall

The anonymity factor is clearly at play here, to an extent. Sure, when no-one can trace you, you can voice your inner most thoughts and angers, no matter how hateful they may be. But anonymity in itself is not sufficient enough an explanation. You can often see people who are in no way trying to hide who they are, acting in a completely different way and sometimes in a more unpleasant way than how they normally would. Or how you could conceive anyone acting towards someone else, especially people they don’t know. I want it to be clear that I’m not talking trolls here, but rather the more general way in which we conduct ourselves and communicate online.

Whether you’re being transparent or not, there is a clear comfort in the ‘wall’ between you and the internet. No matter how much you try to be yourself online, there is always that level of knowledge that you have time to write out what you want to say, that you can self-correct, self-censor. That you can say what you want without the risk of an immediate response or a need to make eye contact. You can turn the screen off and ignore it, if you so wish. Or you can compose yourself for the next comment. Lately I have found myself thinking more than I usually would before sending a tweet or writing something on Facebook. I’ve found myself going to say things that I would normally never say to someone, and I have always tried to be the same person offline as I am online. I’m finding myself getting increasingly drawn into this habit of mouthing off about individuals or companies and using language I never normally would. And I check myself before I do it, because being that way just isn’t me. So what is this strange thing that happens online, that allows you to become almost a different person, at times unrecognisable to the people that know you?

Is it really as bad as Dawkins suggests? Is it something rotten with the internet that encourages us to be like this? I wouldn’t go so far as to describe it in the way that he has, but you can’t ignore the fact that online, people can become quite nasty. This isn’t to say that it’s the internet that’s making people act this way, that it is in some way responsible as a medium (you won’t find me burning copies of Child’s Play here) but it is a fascinating insight into human behaviour, in that it’s allowing us to access a whole new level of communication and act in a different way. We’ve always had written communication, but never with the immediacy of the internet or social media. The fact that it can bring out such different sides of people , both good and bad is affecting not only how we communicate, but is spreading out into entire industries.

To come back to Dawkins’ post, there is something else interesting in what he says. Not the fact that the internet can bring out this ‘hysterical’ behaviour that he discusses, but the act that brought this about. The issue in question was that Dawkins was making changes to the existing forum on his website. Something that, I think, he unfortunately plays down too much. The difference was in changing it from being an open forum, to one that would be moderated. To the extent that starting a new discussion would require approval. Even though I don’t agree with the treatment Dawkins received online, it is understandable why some would have reacted badly to this. Even though he claims it is his right as the owner and editor of the site to extend this editorial control. This is not, however, the function of a forum. It is a discussion. One that should be open and free from control (libel etc.. notwithstanding).

But further still the problem is not so much the editorial control Dawkins was inflicting, but the fact that he was making changes to an already thriving community forum. I feel it is expertly summed up in this post, in a thread unfortunately titled ‘Richard Dawkins is a dick‘

â€œIt may sound ridiculous to those not involved with online communities, but I feel hurt and displaced. It was like coming home to find the locks have been changed.”

Even for those not involved in online communities, it is a pretty compelling and understandable argument. This guardian article also provides further interesting insight into how the old forum moderators were treated. Not all that nicely.

So here we have two incredibly interesting insights into the way we function both as individuals online and how we act within our wider communities. It is evident that Richard Dawkins was in the wrong. Not for wanting to exert editorial control on his own site, but for thinking he could do that and in any way still call it a forum. Our online communities and behaviours are something that we hold quite close to us. Just wait for Facebook to make a change to their site and see the ensuing ‘petition’ to change it back. This is not wholly unreasonable and is a reflection of how we function online. In many cases we conduct a large portion of our lives through an environment that someone else ‘owns’. We have no control over it, it is physically intangible so changes like the one that Dawkins made shouldn’t be overlooked. Bearing this in mind also provides an insight into the language and general tone with which we carry out our online communication. Online our words are all we have. There’s no subtle body language, no hints and no real tone of voice. But inn lieu of these subtleties do we resort to nasty, intimidating language to get our point across?

When all you have is words, every one counts.

Don’t be the first, be the best

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:49:17 +0000

It’s very tempting when you’re thinking of a new campaign/website/business idea/anything to rule it out because ‘someone else got there first’. If we all thought like that then nothing would ever get done and nothing would ever change. There are very few, if any, ideas that are truly new. Nowhere is this more applicable than social media, where everything is a mashup of 3 or 4 other things that went before it, you’re competing with millions of pieces of UGC and, given how easy it is to set up a website, you’re competing with everyone that’s capable of creating a username and password. It doesn’t matter if you’re not the first at something, because you have an even bigger opportunity at your fingertips : you can be the best at something.

Take the example of youtube (this case was brought to my attention by Will McInnes in a seminar a couple of years ago). Now widely recognised as ‘the’ video sharing site, you’d kind of assume that they were the first to market. They weren’t, they were just the best and they blew the competition out of the water. Indeed, while youtube was started in 2005, but there were already plenty of other players in the market. One of the first video sharing sites (share your world) was around as early as 1997, so you can’t even argue that they were new to the market. But that didn’t stop them, clearly. What they did was to look at the problems with the other video sites and then set about to improve them. The difficulty of sharing videos was what prompted them to start youtube and this is the key to their success today. It is incredibly easy to share a video on youtube and crucially, every time someone does this, it is a circulation of the youtube brand.

A look at a video page for youtube really drives this home, though admittedly, not all of these sharing options would have been on the original version.

From the top of the page you have a unique url which can be distributed (not seen here), you have the share and embed options on the right hand side bar, they bring up related videos (leading you to more content on the site), new additions such as sharing via Digg etc…, autoshare, or you can send the video from youtube. Sharing has clearly shaped youtube from its inception and that continues to this day as they add new ways to easily distribute their content and their brand. While youtube didn’t spot a gap in the market by being ‘the first ever’, they spotted what was wrong with the existing options, what was personally frustrating them with the current video sites and they went out and made one that was better.

Google and Apple are 2 companies that provide inspiration by their constant ability to blow all the competition out of the water. It doesn’t matter if they weren’t there first. Was Google the first search engine? No. The first email provider? No. Did Apple build the first computer? No. The first phone? No. Are they the best at all of these? Yes. (subjective, obviously). If you think you’ve got the next killer idea for a client project or new website, don’t be put off by the fact that someones already done it. Sure, you might be afraid that you’re seen to be copying, but if you’ve taken the time to research what’s already been done, how they could have done better and you come along and do that, no-ones really going to think that you’re copying as they’ll be too busy being amazed at what you’ve done.

You need to come out strong and convince people that your ‘thing’ is the best thing out there. That no-one’s doing it as good as you are. True, with social media your potential competitors are vast but by investing time and putting passion into your idea, it shouldn’t matter how many people you’re competing with, if what you’re creating is good enough.Â Build a strong brand around your ‘thing’, give it a personality, shout about what it’s doing that all the others aren’t. Don’t expect people to find it on their own, you need to point them in the right direction, build a community around it, take advantage of the tools of social media. If your product really is that good, then people are going to find that out and pass it on to their followers, fans and friends. Don’t let the fact that others got there before you put you off. Would you rather be remembered for being the first or being the best?

More information, just less of it please

Lauren Fisher — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:54:00 +0000

The way in which we consume information is becoming increasingly important, as we desire as much information as possible, but in much smaller chunks. We’re becoming content machines, so we seek increasingly tailored ways in which to consume that content. We manage subscriptions by rss so we can scroll through posts before deciding what to click on, we use social network aggregators such as friendfeed to get a snapshot of what our online connections are up to, or we scan the homepage of a blog so we can see the titles and decide if anything’s worth reading more on. It is no coincidence that a site whose very basis is sold on short, micro updates is as popular as it is.

An outcome of social media and user generated content is that there is increasing competition to grab the valuable eyeballs and ‘click throughs’. As producers of content we come up with a myriad of ways in which to win this competition through clever titles, excerpts, images to break up the content and, of course, encouraging repeat visitors. The very structure of content on your site can influence whether someone sticks around, regardless of the content you actually give them. This is because we’re becoming incredibly skilfull at getting to the heart of the content before really having to read an awful lot. And the further you get down the chain of ‘clicks’, the less time you have to keep someone’s attention. In 2009 the Nielsen/Norman group produced a report that found the average person spends 51 seconds reading an email newsletter. If they decide to click on a link, they then spend an average of 33 seconds on that site. The more we click, it seems, the less time we have.

We don’t read anymore, we scan

Gone are the days of leisurely browsing a newspaper. We have a job in hand and that is to fill ourselves with as much content as possible. Why not? It’s free after all. Being ‘above the ‘fold’ is now well-established as the sought-after area on a webpage, and this heatmap below shows how people typically scan a site

The way we consume information online is now influencing our print media, as our attention span gets shorter and we apply the ‘scanning’ method. This was discussed recently by columnist Michael Kinsley, where he called for journalists to cut the length of their stories and get to the point quicker. He sees this as the reason why people are abandoning print for online. Whether this is the case, I’m not sure. I think it still comes down to the layout of content. The physical act of buying a newspaper (and turning pages!) is too cumbersome for our fast-paced society. A site that I discovered recently (although launched back in 2007) has got it cracked. Dipity functions in 2 ways. You can use at as an aggregator for all your social activity online (think Friendfeed), or you can search for topics and see the latest information about them, in a range of media forms. See a screenshot of my profile below for an idea of how it works.

This is exactly how I want to consume my content,tiny snippets that allow me to see the source where I can get an easy snapshot of what’s happening online before determining what’s worth clicking through too. This is great for me, when I lead a busy life and need to stay up to date with the latest information. What does this mean though, when I’m sacrificing the length of the content for the quantity of topics?

The effect of technology on our attention spans

The effect that technology can have on our minds and attention spans has been of interest to theorists for some time, particularly those that are vocally outspoken on the detrimental effects of modern technology. There are certainly theories that back this up.Â A study in 2004 into the effects of early exposure to TV to attention span found that it did, indeed, have a negative effect. Bring these findings online and, it seems, the trend continues. A recent study by the University of San Diego found that the human brain is capable of consuming 34gb of information per day, equivalent to 23 words per second. 23 words per second! Many who covered this article claimed that this would have a negative effect on our attention spans.

True, many lament our modern day culture where we need as much as possible, as quickly as possible. But the outcome of the study by San Diego led some to say that this is changing the way in which our brain cells develop. Now, I’m not professing myself as a medical expert of, well, anything, but our current rate of information consumption is certainly resulting in an interesting look into the capabilities of the human brain. While some say we are being over-loaded, others say we are just functioning in a different way. The human brain changes, we instinctively get smarter. Take, for example, the fact that the average IQ test has to be made more difficult throughout the years in order to provide an accurate mark of our intelligence. The rate at which we can adopt new media and scan information is fascinating. I favour something like dipity because it’s given me exactly what I want in short, digestible chunks. Where the internet will take the capability of the human brain and our routines of information consumption is incredibly interesting. We will watch and see what happens, just very quickly

Are You Losing Out By Chasing Your Goals?

Niall Harbison — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:59:17 +0000

See you here in 2013?

We all have a goal in life. Some of us are working hard because we want a four bedroom house, some of us want our start up business to be the next Google, some of us are studying hard so as we can earn 100k a year, some of us are making sacrifices so as we can help others, some of us want to get our website traffic to another level and some of us might just want to find the special someone. We all day dream about these sorts of goals or toss and turn at night figuring out how we can achieve them, they are what keep us going when the roads are icy and the days are short.

My goal as you will guess features going back to Tahiti where I spent lots of time and spending 6 months doing nothing but swimming in that water, lying on the beach and being secure in the knowledge that I never have to work another day in my life. It’s a goal that is a couple of years away at best but one that I am determined to make. Having goals is essential, it is what gets us out of bed in the morning.

We can however get obsessed with goals. They can make us sacrifice quality of life in there here and now. They pressure us. It gets us down that we can’t get there quicker. The goals put pressure on relationships. Our life suffers as we strive to achieve them.

I spoke with 2 successful business men a couple of years ago who had sold companies, one for hundreds of millions and one for a a few billion and both said the same thing…

I just wish I had stopped to take in the journey a little more. The end goal wasn’t as amazing as I had actually though it would be

I might get to the beach and be bored after a week or get hit by a bus on the way to the airport, you might feel just as lonely after moving in to your big house as you were in your small one or you might have all the money in the world from selling your business but nobody to spoil or share it with.

Life is not all about the future, achieving all your goals might not make you as happy as you predicted it would. By all means chase them, and chase them aggressively but sometimes we need to live in the here and now. Do what makes you really happy right now. Today.

Why aren’t we celebrating the wins?

Lauren Fisher — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:25:55 +0000

It’s a Sunday afternoon and we’re all due back in work tomorrow after the Christmas holidays, so I’ll keep this post short My issue is the emerging trend in social media, that is the obsession with failure. Calling out companies or individuals, at times extending to bullying for the latter is rife in social media and there is less that is celebratory. It seems we revel in failure and this is starkly demonstrated by two sites ‘PR Win‘ and ‘PR Fail‘.

The sites function as tweet and delicious streams of people highlighting PR wins or fails. I’ll give you 2 guesses which is more popular. Even more telling, running a search on Twitter for #prfail returns results as recent as one day ago. Running a search for the tag #prwin returns…. no results. Really?

Now, these sites shouldn’t obviously be taken as a total sum on online sentiment and behaviour, but it is certainly an interesting and fairly unique example. It seems we have a bigger desire to highlight the negatives, call out the fails, than we do to celebrate the wins. (And I’m sure it’s not the case that there are no companies practising good PR). Whether this is a basic function of human nature, or behaviour that’s specific to online and social media is an interesting issue. It’s certainly a given that when it comes to review sites such as tripadvisor, you’re only really going to say something if you were either extremely happy or quite pissed off. Social media has little to offer in the area of neutrality because, well, if you don’t have anything to say then you don’t say anything at all. But why are we louder about the fails than the wins?

Was your date fitter on Twitter?

Lauren Fisher — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:08:30 +0000

It used to be nice and simple. Boy meets girl, girl likes boy, second date is dinner, third is breakfast and the rest is history. But something came along and shook that up. Now it’s more like, boy meets girl through friend on Facebook, spies on her page, brings up her favourite interests at dinner and breakfast moves to the first date. Or they met on Twitter so they already know the minutiae of each other’s lives and the conversation is so familiar, it’s almost awkward and a bit weird. And as for meeting people online? Well that was the reserve of ‘weirdo’s who couldn’t get a date in real life. How it’s changed.

Image courtesy of yelp.com

Social networks have had a profound effect on human behaviour. You can know someone and their friends incredibly intimately, before you’ve even met them. There’s no such things as blind dates anymore, unless their Facebook settings are on private of course. Is this a good thing? I’s certainly taken the mystery out of it. If you know your dates name and where they live then you have access to a whole host of information to get to know them before you really know them. Think about it…

Want to see them at their worst?

Okay, so everyone’s capable of putting up their best picture as their avatar. Sometimes they can be deceptive, with the best of intentions. Thanks to tagging on Facebook, you can now see your potential boyfriend/girlfriend in a whole range of pictures so you can see them in their true colours. It may not be as pretty as their profile picture, but at least there’ll be no nasty surprises on the way. Same goes for Flickr.

Looking for witty dinnertime banter?

If you really want to do your research ahead of the first date, there’s a wealth of information at your fingertips. You can just stick your dates name into LinkedIn to look at their career history. Do a bit of research around their previous roles and companies and you have a whole host of banter to unleash at the dinner table, that’ll certainly get your date talking. Just practice your interested face if they tell you about a previous job that you already know all about, but don’t want to let on just how much you’ve been ‘researching’ them online.

Cut to the chase

You could spend time on those early first dates finding out about each other’s interests, but there really is no need when they’re all listed on Facebook anyway. Just look at their favourite books or films and drop these in to get the conversation going. If they’re not too savvy about their privacy settings on Facebook, then you’ll be lucky enough to do this even without having to be their friend on there first, so you still have the element of surprise for knowing them so well.

Don’t want to be stuck with a loner?

Not a problem, simply put their name into Facebook or Twitter and see how many friends they’ve accrued. How many group photos are there? This will easily enable you to see how popular they are and how much they like to socialise. Then you can decide if they’re really right for you without even having to meet them first. What a time saver.

If in doubt, Google ‘em

If at the end of all that research you still don’t know if they’re the one for you, put their name into Google. If there’s anything really bad worth knowing about, Google will have it covered so you can save on a few awkward conversations and excuses not to see them anymore.

The above situation is entirely possible thanks to social media and I’m sure that some, if not all, of the above are regularly carried out by potential couples, or at least one half of them. The issue of being open with your social network profiles and the implication for current or prospective employers is regularly discussed, but dating receives a lot less attention. It’s an everyday situation that we all find ourselves in and it’s yet another area of life that has been radically transformed by social media. To some extent, it’s changed it for good. Online dating is now a regular and acceptable activity and not something to be ashamed of. You could even argue, at a stretch, that in a time pressured society like ours, social media helps you to filter out the rubbish a lot more quickly than sitting through an entire dinner to find out you are in no way matched.

Like I said, it’s completley hypothetical, but entirely plausible nonetheless and I know people that have carried out one or more of these activities on at least one occasion. Where this is the case, something is being lost. Something in the physical subtleties of human contact, whether for dating or friendships. What if their entire bio on Facebook was written in jest, but you can’t pick this up in the tone? What if they have the Facebook app that lets you see who checks out your profile the most and a bit of harmless peeking looks like potential stalking to a date? An extreme example maybe, but it certainly highlights just how much we’re changing as a society and how online communication is affecting so much of everyday life.

Does anyone have their own stories of social media and dating?

Are You A Social Media/Internet Addict?

Niall Harbison — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:02:56 +0000

Do you recognize this pattern….You open Facebook. Look at your notifications. Check your private messages. Log in to Twitter. Check your replies. Send a DM. You Check your work email. Then your personal email. You see a new Twitter follower so check their profile. You send a tweet. You see a YouTube link and watch the video. You click to share it on Facebook. You have a new facebook notification and on and on it goes.

Sheep Mentality?

How many people recognize this cycle? It is happening on computers all over the world in offices, boardrooms, cafes, hotels and factories. We have so much information, so many notifications and so many services vying for our attention. All of these services are trying to increase the amount of time we spend with them, it increases their profits. Websites now have teams of usability experts who follow every click you make. They know how to get you to spend more time sharing content. They know how to get you from your inbox right to the place on the site where you are likely to hang around and share or create content. Our behavior online is being monitored in some great detail and the most of us are blissfully unaware just how we are being watched and herded around the web.

Solutions

So how to you get out of these vicious time wasting cycles? Real work can be really hard to get done when you are only a click away from the latest viral video or a story that has several hundred rewteets and is well worth reading. The only real answer is stubbornness. You need to discipline yourself and put some order on your day. By all means dip in and out when you need a break or during lunch but social media services like Facebook and twitter can consume you and leave you doing precious little real hard work, the stuff that pays the bills. Luckily it being the internet and all there are some great tools out there that can monitor what your are up to and you can slap a little bit of discipline on yourself…

The Nuclear Option

If you really can’t stop looking at all your social media profiles no matter what restrictions you place on yourself them the Leechblock Plugin for the Firefox browser could be the way forward for you. This is a productivity tool that blocks pre-selected websites and you can break it down by time, day, categories etc. So I can block myself from my personal email and my own Twitter accounts during the day. This really is the most extreme option to have to take but some people are so addicted that this might be the only way they can stop themselves. What using this tool does do at the very least is highlight just how reliant you are on those services and it will be a real shock for you when you see your access to sites blocked for the first time! You can of course just turn it off but crucially there is also an option that means you can set it so as you can’t over rule and disable the plugin! I can see computers being thrown out the window at some stage in frustration.

Summary

As with all things the best bet is a little moderation. You need to try and divide your work into manageable chunks and only flick back to all your social media sites when you have a break or need to let the brain relax for a few minutes. At least you now have an extreme big brother style tool to watch over you if you do need it.

When The Going Gets Tough The Tough Get Going

Niall Harbison — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:29:55 +0000

I am veering slightly away from the subject of social media for this post today but bear with me as I think it is a very important point. Life is tough and business life is even tougher. I think a certain generation (my generation) came into business life with rose tainted specs on thinking that apart from the odd hiccup (dot com bubble) things were pretty much plain sailing and it was all Land Rovers and property development all the way. The reality is very different.

You get kicked in the face all the time in life, more so in business life as there is money at stake and people do irrational things when money is on the line. People try to steal your business, charge you too much, bad mouth you behind your back or maybe you are just on a bad run of luck with losing clients or sales. Doing business will get you down at times, not allow you to sleep with worry at night, lose friendships, neglect your family and lots of other irrational behavior and when the going gets tough it can get really tough.

The key to being really successful in business or life in general is to pick yourself up when down. Don’t ever feel sorry for yourself. Don’t doubt yourself when things are not going your way. Never listen to the haters or non believers who always said you would never make it anyway. I am a firm believer in your success will be defined by what you do straight after your darkest hour. When something goes wrong for me personally I won’t let it go and I’ll keep on fighting that day or week until I can turn it in to a success. You might lose the battle but you should never lose the war.

I like to judge people not on how they perform when things are going well and life is good but by how they react when the circumstances change and the odds are stacked against them. To borrow a phrase from Bill Cullen you’ll find out who the “true warriors are” when things start going badly and times are tough. That’s when you’ll know who you want in the trenches beside you for future battles.

The panopticon reversed

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:21:41 +0000

I first attempted this post on my old blog but I’d like to re-examine it and take the subject a bit further.

Many companies talk about the importance of being transparent and communicating with their customers openly and honestly. Many say they do it, but there are still a lot of companies that don’t practice this and assume that they can still dupe their customers. Well, thanks to social media, you can’t. I want to take a model developed by a French philosopher (bear with me!) to demonstrate the importance of being honest in your company both offline and online and show you just how much power the consumer has.

Michel Foucault first developed the idea of the panopticon in his popular work ‘Discipline and Punish’. In it, he explores systemic control of society and how this has evolved from the middle ages. He introduces one concept, that was later examined by Christopher Locke in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Foucault introduced the idea of the panopticon, as a theoretical way to control people within various organisations, namely prisons.

The panopticon is a method of controlling subjects without the need for chains or multiple guards. It works by erecting a central watch point at which one person observes the surrounding subjects, without the subjects being able to see who’s observing them. One person is needed to control the subjects, because crucially, no-one knows when they are being watched. You are forced to abide by the rules all the time ; the subjects begin to self-discipline. The original diagram explains the concept, below.

Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham, 1791 (taken from Wikipedia)

So how on earth does this fit in with social media?

In his section in the Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke argues that because of the internet, the inmates can now see their observers and that the isolated cells are now connected. This is one way to look at it, but I want to take it one step further, showing the real power that the previously subjected individuals now have. I think that the panopticon is now in practice, but with the consumer in the central observation point and businesses surrounding them in the cells, forced to self-regulate. The consumer can now observe organisations, but the companies can’t know when anyone is watching them. Therefore, they have to act as if they are always being watched. The internet has placed a window on companies that allows anyone to see in. Where once consumers had little power, they are now in a position of control and we have seen numerous occasions where people can make or break a company’s reputation. This was demonstrated in the Amazon Fail earlier in the year. Everyone could observe the company and there wasn’t a corner of the internet where Amazon could hide.

People are now in a position of control because of the ability to build communities online. Companies should know that they’re no longer dealing with one single, unconnected individual, but that now all it takes is one tweet or one blog post and your organisation is out there for all to see. Companies that don’t recognise this will soon get left behind and businesses now have to realise that they can be observed from multiple points at all times. The best thing you can do is to communicate with your observers (see Amazon – it’ll only get worse if you don’t) and realise that you can’t pull the wool over people’s eyes anymore. If your product is no good, people will soon know about it

Pioneering The 15 Minute Meeting

Niall Harbison — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:43:06 +0000

I like the American way of doing business. I usually have at least a couple of conference calls a week with people from the USA and we start talking shop about 30 seconds into the conversation and get straight down to the point. I think a lot of us spend our time in meetings every single day that are mostly a huge waste of our time. All meetings I go to seem to last in or around the 60 minute mark, who made that rule up and why do we all stick to it? What could we possibly have to talk about that is going to take an hour to decide? I want to build a website for you and it will cost you more or less X. You want to sell me some fish and you would like me to take X tonnes of salmon. We are going to partner on X project because it will increase your reach and my margin. Simple.

I am all for establishing good relationships with business people and don’t want to come across as rude here but I just wish we had as much efficiency in our offline lives as we do online. Why do we insist on beating around the bush and talking about how great we both are for 40 minutes before reaching the crucial point in the last 10 minutes of the meeting and realizing it is not going to work. We’ll email you about it! You’ll email me? Why don’t we decide right here right now because in case you hadn’t noticed we were having a meeting about it!

This doesn’t apply to all meetings as some partnerships naturally take a little time to eek out and both sides want to make sure they should be getting in to bed with each other. They need to be sure, their reputations are both on the line.

I want to propose an act that is written in to law that means meetings will move from their current 1 hour range to a new maximum cap of 15 minutes. You’ll see just how much time you have and how much more productive you will become. The agenda will be set within the first couple of minutes, the core of the deal agreed in the next 10 leaving the last 3 minutes for chat about the weekend and how horrible the Irish weather is.

Let’s not become victims of push marketing

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:16:44 +0000

I made a short video last week outlining my thoughts on the LinkedIn and Twitter deal. At the time I advocated the move, as it seemed like a natural progression. I’ve since read a piece by Steve Rubel who argues for standardised status update syncing and I’ve rethought my position somewhat. Social media is meant to be about narrowcasting – a specific message tailored for a niche audience where we’re moving away from a ‘one size fits all approach’ of traditional broadcasting. In his post, Rubel briefly advocates the use of sites like ping.fm which allow you to post content across a (very) wide range of social networks. This is not what social media is.

The beauty of social media is that it allows you to reach niche audiences, real people, across a range of platforms. Crucially, it is also about listening. I fail to see the value in sites such as ping.fm where you are essentially broadcasting your own message. Social media is not about simply getting your own message out there, as quickly as possible to as many people. If we’re not careful, we will soon become victims of ‘push marketing’ ourselves as we hope to reach the widest possible range of people. Where’s the conversation in this?

Image courtesy of lempicki.maciek

I have never chosen to synch my updates between Twitter and Facebook, I will never do it for LinkedIn ( I tested it once) and I personally react pretty negatively when I see people doing the same. You’re on these platforms to converse, to engage with people. What’s the point in an update like this on Twitter?

“Facebook : Amy just watched Couple’s Retreat and loved it.”

Where’s the value in that to me? This is a hypothetical message, but I see it all the time. You didn’t tell me on Twitter, but what if I want to comment, do I do it over Twitter when you couldn’t be bothered to log in yourself and do it, or am I forced to log in to Facebook and comment there? Syncing is messy and ultimately discourages conversation. If I’m going to get the most out of a social network platform, I’d say about 50% of my interaction will be replies or comments to other people. You simply don’t get this with syncing status updates.

Similarly, I can’t get my head around the insanity of scheduling Twitter updates through Hootsuite. If you’re not able to tweet because you’re on holiday or on a plane or for whatever reason, then simply don’t be a part of the conversation. You’ll still have friends when you’ll come back and the chances are you’re only going to annoy people because if you’re using scheduled tweets, you probably can’t reply anyway. There seems to be a bit of fear around not getting your own content in all the places, all the time. It really is okay to not be a part of the conversation some of the time.

We also need to consider the suitability of content. I don’t want to have the same conversations on Twitter as I do on LinkedIn or Facebook, for example. I’m on these different platforms for different reasons and the conversation will have a different tone. This isn’t about creating different personas online, but using the sites in the best way for me. I don’t want to send the same updates across all different social platforms because I’m using them in different ways. This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t discuss business issues on Twitter, for example, but the type of content would be different, suitable for my community on that platform. Not least because I’d like more than 140 characters to discuss industry news for example. You choose the platform and build the community that works for your needs. Just like I wouldn’t read the business section of a newspaper if I want a bit of light-hearted celebrity reading. I’d go to Heat magazine for that.

Obviously there will always be a crossover on content, I’m not pretending that I’m a completely different person across different social platforms and that information should be contained in neat silos. But unless you have a real reason for joining a site and want quality conversation, then don’t join. Don’t join for the sake of it and just push out the same content. I quit friendfeed for this reason. All I was seeing were automated Twitter updates and in all honesty, I couldn’t think of anything I’d want to say on there that I wouldn’t want to say on Twitter anyway. The point is that you have to choose the sites that work for you and use them to generate a conversation, not just as another place to push the same content.