Archive for the 'SocialMedia' Category

A Journey of A Thousand Miles

Published by Ben Kepes on October 6, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, New Zealand, SocialMedia and Strategy. 1 Comment

Subsequent to TelecomONE over the weekend, and after a session discussing the social media activities of Telecom employees - some issues became evident.

I’ve always been impressed that Vodafone New Zealand allow (and, I assume, encourage) Paul Brislen, their PR man, to participate in social media - be it on Geekzone, Twitter or this blog.

There has always been a stark contrast between themselves and Telecom New Zealand. I have at least half a dozen friends (yes I consider you friends :-) ) within TNZ who are actively engaged in social media - add to that the number of ex-TNZ employees are who were during their TNZ days. All of these people who participate do so anonymously.

At TelecomONE, Telecom high flier Alan Gourdie personally undertook to address this anomaly. Big ups to Alan for both fronting up and making the undertaking.

Even bigger ups to Neil Forster - Neil was the main organiser of TelecomONE, who put his heart and soul into the event. Until now he’s always blogged and twittered anonymously - but I was stoked to read this morning him publicly out himself.

Share the love...
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »

Marketing 101 (and so sad that it’ll probably work)

Published by Ben Kepes on October 6, 2008 in Business, IT, New Zealand, New business, SocialMedia, Society and Strategy. 1 Comment

I just got forwarded the following email;

Sam added you as a friend on Facebook.  We need to confirm that you know Sam in order for you to be friends on Facebook.
Sam says, "Www.smcreative.co.nz
is a multi - disciplined Graphic Design/ contemporary art company based in New Zealand. I don’t know who you are, as I am trying to get my website out there.
cheers,
Sam.".

Apart from the fact that brand building via a social network is marginally effective - it’s pretty amazing to think that someone would actually try and "friend" a complete stranger in order to further their fledgling business - and in the same line to ‘fess up to not actually knowing them.

The really sad thing about this is that the lust to amass a large number of "friends" on Facebook is such that this guy will probably be rivaling Robert Scoble pretty soon.

It’s a sad world huh?

Related articles by Zemanta
Share the love...
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »

On building communities of interest

Published by Ben Kepes on September 29, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, SocialMedia and Strategy. 8 Comments

It was interesting to read this post by Ben (another Ben) who details the rise and rise of Vodafone’s community forum site.

Ben says that there is a reluctance within corporate New Zealand to invest the time to build web communities - possibly due to a fear that they’ll build it and no one will come.

Ben reports on the results that Voda have had;

launched an online forum at August 1st 2008.

Investment was:

  • $150 for forum license
  • 3 people engaged over a month, checking in every now and again to keep an eye on it
  • Link under Help on Vodafone website and a mention on Geekzone

Results:

  • 250,000 visits with an average time of just under 4 minutes.
  • That’s a whooping 1 million minutes/ month.  Or the equivalent of 697 days (back to back) of attention.
  • 356 registered members and ~3000 posts (till Sept 17th)

From other forum’s Vodafone has run, they have found only 1 out of 5 questions requires an official response.

Over time the forum will build a repository of information that will provide answers to users without ANY extra work by Vodafone.

I’m involved in a project that’s building a community of interest in New Zealand - we’re getting closer to going live now (a couple of months away) and these results are the sort of thing that are music to my ears - it’s not necessarily about the traffic (although traffic is good). It’s about the level of engagement, the efficiencies gained by conversing directly with your customer base and the credibility gain that comes from being out there and prepared to talk.

Of course the real test is what happens when the conversation on the forum takes an unplanned for, and uncomfortable turn - will Voda still be happy to invest the time in it? I certainly hope so.

We’re all to prepared to say that the online community is only a small proportion of the total population. While this is true the results above show that it’s a proportion that is more than happy to engage - and engagement is an exceptionally powerful driver.

Share the love...
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »

Joining the microblogging legions….

Published by Ben Kepes on September 20, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS, SocialMedia, The Cloud and Web x.0. 1 Comment

Legions of different applications that is…

At the recent Techcrunch50, Twitter-for-enterprise startup Yammer took out the top prize. I was interested to read a post by Bernard a couple of days later where he uncharacteristically lashed the decision. Basically Bernard calls Yammer a "me too" offering that offers little that existing offerings do not. Bernard’s specific criticisms were;

1. No barriers. Lots of alternatives already exist, some very credible. Even some open source. This looks like an engineer’s side project. In engineer speak this is "trivial". I am sure there are dozens of clones already and many more being hatched right now.

2. The incumbent can replace their advantage way too easily. What stops Twitter adding some features to make it more appealing to enterprises? I imagine they are already considering this.

3. No natural early adopter. The normal early adopter is on Twitter. The early adopter within companies? If you are a good corporate citizen Yammer would look a bit career-threatening - for reasons explained below.

It’s interesting to see just how many offerings exist in the microblogging-for-enterprise space (list courtesy of Jeremiah);

Prologue, by Automatic, makers of Wordpress
Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment (ESME)
Yammer
SocialCast
Laconica - The Open Microblogging Tool
Status
Trillr
I Did Work
OraTweet -Oracle