Posted by adi on Nov 26, 2009 in
Work I read with interest the discussion over at TechCrunch this morning about business networking site LinkedIn surpassing 3 million UK members recently. Many commenters mentioned how they have accounts but never use the site, therefore casting doubt on the worth of the 3 million number.
It strikes me though that this is the same issue regardless of what social media site you mention because I hear exactly the same arguments used when people discuss Twitter. “Oh I’ve signed up but can’t see the point so have never used it” they will say.
Of course if people have no reason for using a service then it will be very difficult for them to ever gain any value from it. It’s no different in the social media world than it is in any other activity. If you have no goal in mind and no strategy for achieving this goal then how can you possibly get value from the activity?
So the moral of the story for me is don’t do something just for fashions sake or to keep up with the Jones. If you’re going to use LinkedIn go in with a clear goal in mind for what you want to get out of it.
Tags: LinkedIn, social media, Twitter
Posted by adi on Nov 14, 2009 in
Default A few years ago I setup an Everton fan page on Facebook as there was no official page at that time. It proved really popular with fans and quickly grew to 20,000+ followers.
Recently Facebook have been cracking down on pages and as mine was not an official Everton authorized page my publishing rights were revoked. Finding out how to contest this decision was an incredibly difficult job, but that’s probably for another blog.
What has amazed me however was the response from Everton when this issue was put to them to see if they could help out.
Instead of seeing the potential for communicating with this large list of fans the club instead started threatening legal action for using things like the club logo and daring to use the clubs own Facebook application on the page. The only way they would help is if the page was changed to something not mentioning Everton at all.
Talk about biting your nose off to spite your face. Such a shame as football clubs are such a natural audience for social media as fans are so willing to do an awful lot of work on the clubs behalf. Sadly few clubs seem willing or able to let go of control and leverage this enormously powerful resource. A message to the clubs should surely be that the brain power of these supporters is just as important, if not more so, than the money you can extract from them.
Tags: everton, Facebook, fan pages, social media
Posted by adi on Nov 14, 2009 in
Default I went to a ‘measurement camp’ last week with the aim of finding out more about how social media activity can be measured. Unfortunately it didn’t really shed much light on things.
Do you go after the revenue approach to measurement, in which case it almost inevitably means last click wins? Do you look for a more PR type measurement? I’m fairly sure that headline numbers such as that of Twitter followers is useless, but what else is there?
What do people use to measure the effectiveness of their social media work?
Tags: measuring, social media
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