I finished my talk at the Go Social bootcamp last week with a few points about social media, a couple of them were “Beware the Guru” and “Smell the Coffee.” Interestingly Milo Yiannopoulos of The Telegraph wrote an article on a similar subject last week, which seems to have stirred some strong opinion.   Social Media Editor at Haymarket Gordon Macmillan, quickly put up a spirited defence on social media blog, “The Wall” which you can read here.

I was asked earlier by Twitter user @sarahpowell1988 what my view of this was.   I’ve made a number of posts over time on related issues.  There are a lot of consultants our there jumping on this bandwagon, describing social media as if it were some silver bullet.  My stock response to this is, “it isn’t.” One of my favourite sayings (which you can see in the talk) is “It’s a horse, not a Unicorn.” Social media is just one thing you should do to add to your existing range of activities, it’s not mutually exclusive and is not going to rescue you in a recession.

I am contacted by agencies trying to sell me social media (rather than an on-line strategy) all the time.  A few of them have been sent away with a flea in their ear for not doing their homework, they generally get pointed to this blog rant.  Enough said.

Like anything that’s flavour of the month, you’ll get your self-proclaimed experts who will give the other experts a bad name.  Social media networks allow anyone to package themselves nowadays and – during recessions – businesses want new initiatives to engage with customers.

However, you’d be a fool to ignore it. You have to distinguish fads from trends.  Fads come and go, trends stay.  Social media is a trend. Platforms may be transient over time, however the principal of status updates, right to reply, web 2.0, however you want to put it, will remain.  Got a complicated product?  Simplify it by putting a video on Youtube.  Need to reach out to a specific person in a Corporate?  Linked is your short cut.  Want to pick up on real time search for an audience looking for your product?  Twitter is where it’s at.  These are three really obvious ones.

Milo’s point I think boils down to this. You need to be able to distinguish between someone who knows what they are doing as part of an overall digital strategy, with clear delivery credentials who can show results.  You might need to cut your way through a jungle of people that claim to be something they are not, what’s new, however due diligence remains as an important part of any new partner you deliver in to your business.  If you’re rigorous bringing experts in, you’ll filter the flaky self-proclaimed gurus out.

Yesterday, I did a short talk at the Go Social Bootcamp in Manchester.  I called my talk “Social Media Sucks (or Bucks?)” to highlight that many leaders of large businesses don’t get social media as they can’t see what return on investment it gives. 

You can view the presentation here, it should show the main reasons why leaders should get involved.  Clearly, it’s missing a load of narrative, if you want to hear that, come hear me speak!

What can business do to contribute to the big society ideal formed by the government? That was the main question primed towards a small audience of business leaders by Business In The Community at an event in Manchester tonight.  I hadn’t really given it much thought previously, however in the surroundings of Manchester Business School and in the company of some bright minds we attempted to try and identify just some of the facilitators and barriers.

What’s obvious is that there are no easy answers or quick fixes.  There is a massive societal shift needed. Who will move first?  Is competition too fierce in the global economy now for us to adopt these holistic ideals?  There were some interesting points made, however it was clear that it won’t be easy to get quick traction.  Nevertheless, here’s a few of the points I thought relevant (in no particular order).

• Will people be prepared to work less hours for less pay to see more people in employment? - Tough one and the government might not like the answer.  We live in an age of consumption.  Of acquiring things.  My device is better than your device.  My TV is bigger than your TV.  Will people be prepared to trade down for the bigger good?
• There’s no financial incentive. You really want to motivate a businessperson to get involved, show them an opportunity, not a draw on their time.
• The bulk of business people represented on panels like this are normally large and successful. You only needed to see the audience in the room tonight.  All Gen X.  Board Directors in successful businesses.  You wont hear the view of  SME’s who make up 99.8% of business.  They are the ones you need engaged too as they employ half the UK workforce and can be more inciteful as to the conditions they would need to donate their time.
• If the Big society makes us globally uncompetitive, forget it. Harsh, however social investments rely on economic prosperity, a fine balance.
• Do Generation Y care like Generation X do? Generation Y (digital natives) have a completely different outlook on life.  They are pursuing fame and instant fortune (bit stereotypical I know), however this may get in the way of their ambitions.  You have to incentivise at all levels to get change happening.
• You need some new innovation in there somewhere. Salami slicing public sector expenditure and then shifting the burden to business, just isn’t on.  We all know the public sector is hugely inefficient in many areas.  Why not incentivise private sector business to drive savings and efficiency in public sector?
• Get local government to spend more of their grant with local businesses, not on national contracts. They can then insist on some of the big society ideals as part of the supply agreement.  Seen it done already and it works.
• The future isn’t public or private. It’s a fusion of both in the big society.  A fusion of Enterprise.  Rip down the barriers to enterprise.  Make public sector procurement easier.  Making the planning process easier for businesses to build the premises they need.  By expanding, there will be more jobs in the economy.  Carving up current jobs – in my view – just isn’t the answer.
• Do people have the time for all this? People are pressured.  T.A.T. rules.  Time is at a premium.  Work/Life blend is poor.

I’m not negative about it, just realistic. I’d love to see a society, which is more like Japan for example.  Purposeful.  Respectful.  More societal in its outlook.  However, people will need to see quick and early wins for this one to make it’s way out of the manifesto and into everyday practice.  It’s a big job, however a worthy aim.  What do you think?

Obsession with the number of followers that you have on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin seems to be where a lot of people are at right now. As if, there is some sort of hard measurement technique as to how good you are at that particular activity or how popular you are as an individual.  It’s completely understandable, as normally, that’s how things are measured.  The more people you reach, the higher the chance of influence or response of say a mailshot or e-shot.

However, any marketeer will tell you that a mailshot mailed to a million homes with poor content or bad design, will have a low response rate.  A personalised mailshot sent to 1,000 homes will have far greater impact.  This is quite a good metaphor for the way social media works.   Car brands  do it all the time.  Low end brands put brochures in Sunday newspapers, Premium brands send personalised letters to target postcodes.

If you are obsessed with followers, hanging on to every new one and de-railing everytime someone unfollows you, you might be taking it all a bit too seriously.  I’ve learned over the last couple of years, that followers on Twitter come and go.  If you follow back everyone that follows you, you begin to manufacture your own junk news channel, it all becomes noise again.  So, choose who you follow carefully to ensure your content is of a high quality.

Additionally, having all these contacts can be a diminishing return. A network, is not a collection of thousands of contacts if you don’t actually know anyone (that’s a thousand contacts).  For me, my business network is people that I know and have met, I call this social2facial.   When you have met someone, you get to know them and build up trust (a key driver in today’s expectation economy).  You understand their objectives and goals better and you can work to assist them in achieving them by making introductions or recommendations to others. Interactions become personalised and more relevant.

Of all the people I know on Twitter, around 15% make it to my Linkedin network (where I store contacts that I have met).  They are the people whom I’m most likely to turn to for opportunities.  Conceptually then, I am using Twitter to identify people I’d like to meet after a period of engagement, then to take that relationship off-line to see where business might go.

Finally, I have limited time to be able to spend on social networks.  I run a big business and have lots of interests away from the office, so it’s all about a balance of how many quality relationships you can actually maintain on and off-line relative to the time you can invest.  If you have a huge pool, you might not be able to engage with them and end up being an information broadcaster, rather than a conversationalist.  Twitter expert Mark Shaw writes lots of great blogs around this topic, check him out.

What do you think?

What is the modern day equivalent of The Little Black Book? Which is the one place, which – aside from all others – all your key contacts are kept?  Is it the address book in Microsoft Outlook (e-mail addresses)?  Your phone address book (text numbers)?  Twitter?  Linkedin? Facebook?

Most people no longer have one single place, probably multiple places.  Varying degrees of social media platforms with differing types of contacts on.  Thinking of my own situation, I use a combination of Outlook, Linkedin, Twitter and Gist.  Outlook primarily as there are a lot of people I know who are not into social media, I still need to keep a kind of e-mail directory of those.  I recently discovered Gist to suck together Twitter and Linkedin contacts so that activity can be tied together, it’s quite a clever little app, albeit a bit slow to respond sometimes (my woeful 0.5mb home broadband doesn’t help).

Even so, you should always keep a closer eye on your top contacts.  Gist allows you to prioritise your contacts, which is a decent feature.  That way, you get to see what’s really going on with your Top 10% of contacts and ensuring you stay relevant in their world. What is evident is that there is a large amount of online intelligence about your key contacts nowadays, digital breadcrumbs are scattered everywhere and applications which draw information together, filter and prioritise, will really help you to understand the challenges, movements and new connections that people you know are making.

By keeping tabs on who is doing what, you can add value to your network, help solve problems, make new connections and grow the number of people you know.  The more people you do know, the more opportunities seem to come and – ultimately – the more business you’ll win.

A quick analogy to share with you tonight. It was used by one of the psychologists that ran a workshop for the team today, it relates to taking time out.

Two lumberjacks were felling trees in the forest with a traditional two man saw, after a full morning, they set to fell the largest tree in the forest.  Working furiously, they struggled to get the saw moving and expdended huge effort trying to make progress through the trunk.  As the afternoon progressed they continued to work, making little progress as the night started to fall.  Another passing lumberjack, stopped for a moment, seeing the tiny progress they were making.  “Did you sharpen your saw? ” he shouted over.  The two lumberjacks ignored him and carried on, with the same intensity of effort.  He walked towards them and repeated the words, “Did you sharpen your saw?”

The moral of the story is this. Rather than continuing to work with a blade, which had become blunt, the two lumberjacks needed to stop, sharpen their saw and then get back to cutting the tree. By doing this, they would have saved a lot of effort and got the job done.

The story was used today as a metaphor for businesses that don’t take time out and take stock.  Instead, carrying on being busy, sweating processes as hard as they can  and potentially repeating failure or ignoring problems.  By stopping to “sharpen the saw,” you may be able to step back, take a different look at your problems and come up with a different solution.  The point being, it may be time neutral.  If the two lumberjacks had stopped to sharper their saw, they would have stopped working for half an hour or so, however the tree would have been felled before dark.

With a huge amount of pressure on businesses right now, it’s important to stop and think.  The stepping back/out of the business for half a day or a day can be time well invested.  Giving people a chance to talk, to re-connect away from the processes, hustle and bustle.  So my question to you is, when did you last sharpen your saw?

Chatting with a colleague about “businesses or things that exist today, that didn’t exist when we were growing up” yesterday, got me thinking about eBay. Founded in 1995, it’s now part of our everyday language and has a next to near perfect business model, connecting millions of people together into a trading community, like no other.

Imagine a business, that doesn’t make anything, doesn’t have a warehouse or a product, doesn’t ship anything, yet turns over $6bn a year.  Yes, please, I’d like some of that. Particularly when you consider how much they make per transaction.  Let me give you an example.  Mrs Jones recently sold a pair of designer shoes on e-Bay.  She’d bought them from new, worn them twice (typical) and then decided they were a big too big for her.  So, time to get rid.

Working out the fees that eBay collected on the overall transaction – 13.5% – it made me think what a money making machine the platform is.  What value did they add?  They connected two buyers together and provided an electronic trading platform.  We all know, that this represents pennies in transactional costs, yet the cash margin they made was around £33 on sale item of £249, they take a percentage from everything, including the financial payment through their payment platform – Paypal.  Not bad considering we packaged and shipped the goods!

I’m sure the average UK IT distributor, who has to carry stock, fund a warehouse, provide logistics, credit and the like, yet still do this with a cost structure of around 6-8 per cent and an overall trading gross margin which sometimes doesn’t even make double digits, would give their right arm for it.

And they continue to go from strength to strength.  The trusted and familiar nature of the trading platform means that it, along with Amazon, has almost become the default website for price checking anything.  eBay sells as much brand new stuff nowadays as it does used, it genuinely is a storefront for merchants selling goods of all shape and size.  And, its scale is such a size that it would be difficult for any market entrant to challenge them.

They are a great example of a business that took advantage of the here and now, back in 1995.  They had an idea, saw the gap, went away, developed it, stuck with it through the hard times and saw it grow into a global busineness.  There’s lessons there for any business, some of which are: - Always think ahead.  Watch for social trends. Preserve time to think.  Challenge market conventions and disrupt where necessary.  What could be your next big thing?