Facebook Pages

I’ve been playing with Facebook Pages recently for a couple of clients and decided that I wanted to set myself up with one for my music.

I had until a few weeks ago avoided setting up a Facebook Page because I wasn’t sure if it would be of interest to anybody i’m friends with, and didn’t want to spam them any more than I already do.

However, after thinking about the way that Facebook users interact with brand fan pages, I wanted to give it a go and set one up.

We’re seeing a shift in the way people show their support for brands, with a move from buying the product to declaring their fondness via publishing comments about them. This is helping consumers to define their identities, but not be defined by the brands the choose to advocate.

I am of the opinion that people sign up to Pages not to interact, the 100-10-1 rule would indicate that, but more this act is used as a way of promoting their interest, using the text and link that show up on their Facebook profile as a badge.

Facebook Pages allow users to opt-in to being part of a community and this indicates that they are willing to receive information, updates and news, if it is managed in an appropriate manner (ie not publishing one update per hour).

This made me realise that there is no harm in setting up a Page – if people want to join it, they will.

It is now my job to ensure that thecontent I post is relevant and will add some value to their otherwise saturated news streams… eek!

Friends With Benefits: Book Review

I was recently sent a copy of Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook, for review by the O’Reilly Media team in the US.

Written by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo of Capulet Communications in the States, the book is intended to be an introductory walk through the wild west of the social media landscape, providing insight and practical help on how best to start getting your company involved in online discussions.

And, it does exactly that, following a clearly structured process which takes you chapter by chapter through the various elements of using social media as a marketing channel.

Throughout each phase of the guidance, Darren and Julie offer case studies of good and bad practice to help illustrate the wyas in which people have tried, failed and succeeded to successfully engage consumers and communities online.

There are useful indexes of tools to use and places to visit to help you in your quest to master online marketing. Darren and Julie also tackle M&E (measurement and evaluation) to show you how you can attempt to prove whether any activity you’ve undertaken was successful or not, something that many people forget to mention.

One of the most interesting passages was the section on influencer engagement – I’m always eager to put other’s point of view against my own – and I really liked the approach to criticism from one of these key individuals of a product that Darren and Julie take:

So what happens if an online influencer pans your product? Share your point of view. Silence says you’re not monitoring the Web closely enough to know what’s going on, and more importantly, that you don’t care enough to do a Google search on your company name. It also says that you’re not part of the community and that you’re not willing to engage in the online conversation.

This honest point of view is something that marketers new to social media, scared of the impact of negativity online about their company, should defiitely keep in mind.

This book, in conclusion, is an excellent introdcution to social media. It provides useful information, practical help, and examples of what to do as certain scenarios are played out in an easy to floow, friendly manner. If you’re looking for a good guide of all this stuff that’s happening online, this could be a useful book to have on your shelf.

I’m a little late putting together this write up, but I hope you find it useful, and if you want to buy the book itself, you can do so right here on Amazon.

Learning Vocals

When you start out in a band, one of the most important bits, apart from making sure you can at least hold your instrument, is the willingness to be open minded and exploratory. The more you play and practice, the better you become individually at whatever it is you play, and collectively you develop a feeling of how the combined parts of noise you’re making should sound.

Being the singer, it is of course no different. Your voice will gradually get trained to hit the right notes, you’ll work out how to hit higher and lower tones and eventually, you’ll get to a point where you have discovered how to breathe properly inbetween vocal phrases to maximise both.

This is a skill that can be taught, but it can also be learned. Getting the skills and ideas from coaching sesions is useful, but it doesn’t, in my opinion, allow you to find out why what’s important is important, for yourself.

The similarity with this in diplomacy, in PR in particular, is staggering, and is only just dawning on me.

It is important to be vocal and to share your point of view with your colleagues, especially if you disagree and you can justify why you have a conflicting point of view. Where the comparison meets is that the timing and way that a point of view is presented is all important.

If you’re vocal at an inappropriate time, or in an inappropriate volume or tone, there is a real possibility that it will do more harm than good in the long run both personally and professionally.

It’s easy to reach to a snap judgement, air your views and be done with it. It’s easy to write a scathing music review, publish it and move on. It’s easy to shout and scream untunefully over a great guitar solo, move on and eventually get thrown out of the band.

Keeping calm, rational and reasoned is a difficult skill to harness, and like most things, comes with practice if you’re not naturally born with it.

Self-expression I guess is one thing, and self-control is another, but by marrying the two the end result will be more productive and conducive to positive results in the long run.

A big hat tip to Will Humphrey for his insight.

Google Stars

Google has announced the integration of stars, a new feature that will allow you to ’save’ search results which will then appear in subsequent searches you make in the future.

The blog says:

The great thing about stars is that you don’t have to keep track of them. You don’t even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you’ll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature.

Stars in search replace SearchWiki. In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn’t like changing the order of Google’s organic search results. With stars, we’ve created a lightweight and flexible way for people to mark and rediscover web content. For people who like annotations, we have Sidewiki, a more powerful way for people to contribute and discover helpful information next to pages across the Internet. All your existing SearchWiki edits will be preserved with your Google Account. You can learn more on our help center.

Stars in search are rolling out in the next couple days and will be available globally for all signed-in users.

I think this is a really interesting move from Google and will make the user experience more interesting and more importantly, even more useful.

What do you think the impact of Google stars will be, and do you think the new feature will be useful?

Twitter Opens The Firehose

Yesterday Twitter published a blog post, Enabling A Rush of Innovation, announcing further partnerships with vendors who will have access to their data:

Today, we’re happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery. We are thrilled to announce that Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search join us as partners. These companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-person operations so we came up with a fair way to license access that scales with their business.

This is important because it means that as well as allowing a wider access to user data, it means that these companies will be able to apply it to their offering and potentially develop new uses for the data stream that we’ve not yet seen.

Spotify to Stream Jimi Hendrix Video

Spotify, everybody’s favourite music streaming service, is set to stream a video of the new Jimi Hendrix video for Bleeding Heart.

According to a post today on their blog:

The video, which is currently available to view exclusively by users of the Spotify Free service across Europe, kicks off Sony Music’s global promotional campaign for Hendrix’s upcoming album Valleys of Neptune.

The video is being release a few weeks before Jimi’s new album, Valleys of Neptune, which will be available exclusively for Spotify Premium subscribers starting March 4th. Valleys of Neptune features twelve stunning studio recordings tracks, many of which have never been heard before.

This is an exciting development for Spotify and music video streaming.

Of course we can all choose You Tube to find our favourite music videos, but for Spotify to offer exclusive video content, only available to premium members, is a huge step forward for the Swedish company.

It adds another reason to sign up for a premium account and hence make them a little bit more money, but it also begs the question: how soon can they roll out more exclusives, and will this in turn lead to them becoming the main hub for music videos on the net and usurping YouTube in the music space?

What do you think?

Who Is Responsible For Internet Content?

Mashable is reporting today that three Google Executives have been found guilty of privacy violations, giving them a 6 month suspended sentence.

The Google employees were sued after a video was posted (and subsequently removed) to Google’s video sharing site showing a boy with Down syndrome being bullied.

Google responded to the decision with a blog post:

“We are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

I think this is deeply troubling. Why should three people, with no direct involvement in the recording or posting of the video, find themselves the subject of criminal activity?

I agree with Stan Shroeder’s assessment of this when he says:

[it] at the very least bizarre and shows a blatant misunderstanding of how the Internet and various social content sharing services work.

The way we consume and share content has changed irreversibly, for better or worse, and content ownership rights have to be updated as a result.

Three individuals, with no direct involvement with the video, should not be faced with prosecution, letalone prison. It is up to the police to find the people in the actual video and to bring them to justice.

What do you think?