Nurphy

Drew: Like Minds Social Media Conference.

First of all welcome and thanks for taking part in the first Like Minds conference. Like Minds has become “a discovery service for identifying new stuff; including movies, books, music, people and places, with the help of other like-minded people.”

What you’ll find is relationship amongst innovative thinkers, collaboration on projects and campaigns, and the synergy that creative endeavours bring amongst people.

Our inaugural event is on Friday October 16th, focusing on the subject of ‘measuring social media.’ To start the day off we're asking our sponsors, speakers and panel a few questions. Feel free to join in and add your own thoughts and questions.

Q: Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM) is an area that has recently become increasingly important to companies and brands. WOM is arguably the Mother of Advertising but has it's influence in the marketing mix been increased through the growth in Social Media?

Rokkster: Q. Companies are investing heavily in building profiles on platforms such as
Twitter with no guarantee that they will even be in existence a year from
now. Should we build a strategy around specific channels, or should we be
thinking more generically about the social media space?

Q. Other than 'unfollowing', what's the polite way to ask someone to
'quieten down' their tweeting/status updates?

Q. How does the panel feel Google can break into social networking given
their attempts to date have been mediocre?

Documentally: "Q. Companies are investing heavily in building profiles on platforms such as
Twitter with no guarantee that they will even be in existence a year from
now. Should we build a strategy around specific channels, or should we be
thinking more generically about the social media space?"

Yes.. it's the spaces between the places that's important. As out networks become easy to migrate they will just exist across and between the online places.

It's important to be involved now in twitter and suchlike to build & nurture those networks. If it's a good one it will always be there.

"Q. Other than 'unfollowing', what's the polite way to ask someone to
'quieten down' their tweeting/status updates?"

Either unfollow or filter.. If these people want to tweet alot you either skim past and don't let it affect you or unfollow. Ask yourself why you are following the person in the forst place. Is there a two way conversation going on? Are you just being polite? etc..

"Q. How does the panel feel Google can break into social networking given
their attempts to date have been mediocre?"

Google is everywhere.. Wave.. although has had a soggy response has only just began and i still think it will surprise us.

Nurphy.com on the other hand surprised me from the start.. :P

Drew: Some great questions here @Rokkster that raise a few more issues...

Q: Why would VC's invest in start-ups that have a business model that totally relies on other tech platforms that they have no control over? If they collapse your business collapses which is a very high risk investment strategy.

I agree with @Documentally that we should get involved in these platforms particularly as they now offer integration with each other so the chance that your network getting switched off is reduced. I don't think there will be one "winner" as whilst they're alike they don't offer the same functionality.

Personally I tend to use LinkedIn professionally, Facebook socially and I use Twitter mostly as a mobile app (that auto posts to FB) which increasingly has replaced my texting and some email. For conversations and collaberative working I've found Nurphy is a great tool. We project managed the Like Minds event on it and it worked a treat :-)

Rokkster: I think an holistic approach to social marketing that doesn't focus on one
particular channel has to be the top level to any strategy. Determining what
the objectives should be, and then which channels would work best based on
the target audience for example. It's perhaps a sign of a new field that too
many people concentrate on a platform of choice because they are comfortable
with it - rather than working their strategy. Personally I am convinced that
Twitter will be owned by Google inside of a year and Facebook will dominate
for the next five to gradually be replaced by niche solutions.

Rokkster: Q: Why would VC's invest in start-ups that have a business model that totally relies on other tech platforms that they have no control over? If they collapse your business collapses which is a very high risk investment strategy.

If you are thinking of application developers who build software based on a platforms API/SDK (e.g. Twitter - Tweetie, TweetDeck, EchoFon et al), then absolutely this is a risky strategy and all involved must work on a very short-term model. But in terms of utilising these channels for marketing purposes if you approach it holistically without concentrating all your marketing eggs, and watch the market for new areas of growth to work with, it shouldn't be a problem.

Neil: @Rokkster, @Drew, @Banksy6, @Olivier, @Trey, @Daren, great to meet you yesterday.

Did anyone have thoughts on the benefits of discussion forums with regards to conversation SEO? Twitter is a great tool for getting the word out - but tweets don't stay in the timelines for very long, and conversations are often hard to follow. So when it comes to knowledge sharing (be it answering customer inquiries, detailing a product feature set, etc), and picking up rankings in Google, perhaps discussions forums could play a role for companies needing to aggregate content and use it over an extended period.

There could be synergy between a discussion forum & Twitter account. For example, tweets could broadcast & highlight the best-of forum commentary, and the discussion forum would archive the content and help prevent the same questions from being asked twice. To that end, would anyone advocate a two-pronged approach of Twitter + discussion forum when setting up in-house Conversationalists (thanks @Daren!), or are discussion forums a little outdated in comparison to current social media trends?

Banksy6: Woah - had to read that one a couple of times Neil :)

I'm not sure there is one hard and fast rule for this - I would guess that different business types suit different styles of communication. For example a customer service style business might want to take a customer service enquiry into a discussion based tool but Im not sure if a marketing person/dept would. I have my reservations because IMO all sales/marketing people would probably want to use these tools to get real life interaction as quickly as possible - therefore the next logical step after something like twitter would be a meeting or a phonecall.

My other concern is that everyone's very busy and it takes so much longer to get into a discussion - just look how long its taken me to reply here :)

Not sure if any of that makes any sense!