Are Social Media Roles still specialist or mainstream?Steve Ward of Cloud Nine Social Media and Digital Talent talks to us about the changes he sees in recruitment practices for social media roles.
Sam Mitchell of Chinwag ran Social Media Week London for five years. He talks to us about moving on and the development of the conference Chinwag Psych covering psychology, neuroscience, behavioural economics and more.
The necessity to make our messages stand out and get noticed combined with our ever increasing ability to filter out what we’re not interested in is leading to the use of a complex mix of disciplines. Sam gives a fascinating overview of how these knit together and explains why small businesses have the edge in this fast moving sphere.
These are some of the resources that Sam mentions in the interview:
• Pack A Powerful Punch – How To Write A Killer Headline By Nathalie Nahai
• Neuromarketing Is Bulls**t By Craig Sullivan - amazing collection of tools to ue
• Crowd Emotion - company tracking emotions via webcam
• The Neuroscience of Telling Stories by Sarah Walker
• ComproGear Bariatric Compression Stockings Article
• The Size of the Planning and the Size of the Problem by Benjamin Ellis (his take on planning and the 45-day planning for a corporate tweet)
• Conscious Business - Tomorrow’s Company Today - meetup for creating new, open organisations
• Call to Action by Bryan Eisenberg (an oldie, but a goodie) - the one I mentioned that features micro-persuasion
• Robotics Mission to California (23-27 June) - still a few spaces left, if any robotics or autonomous systems companies are interested
• Idea Management Platform, I mentioned - Spigit, also a UK-competition Wazoku who spoke at Chinwag Psych in 2013.
• For more on applying psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics sign-up to the PsychMatters newsletter or follow on Twitter.
Any business wondering how to tackle social media and integrate a diverse organisation, empower employees with different skill levels and provide real value for clients on both a local and national level will find lots of inspiration and ideas in this interview.
Athar Abidi is Age UK‘s Social Media Manager. He creates huge value for 150 brand partners, supports and advises local volunteers, markets campaigns and events and produces shareable content for Age UKs main beneficiaries - old people.
Through the use of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, Athar manages multiple streams of activity. He talks to us about the tools he uses and the techniques that gently challenge preconceptions.
Athar mentions a poem in the campaign for Love Later Life that can be found here:
lll (dot) ageuk (dot) org (dot) uk/
Follow Age UK on Twitter
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Some businesses shy away from using Pinterest because they think they don’t have a strong visual presence.
Ekaterina Walter talks to us about the ways businesses of all types are using Pinterest to drive 25% more traffic to their websites and why Pinterest users spend 15% more than Facebook users.
An expert in visual story telling, Ekaterina shares invaluable insights into how any business can use images to their advantage, why we are attracted to images, especially cartoons, and why this is her favourite story told in one simple image:
During the interview Ekaterina mentions a mobile phone company that uses very powerful storytelling in this three minute video.
Ekaterina Walter led strategic and marketing innovation for brands such as Intel and Accenture, and is currently a CMO of Branderati. She is an international speaker and author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller “Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg” and co-author of “The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand.” Ekaterina sits on a Board of Directors of Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Her thought leadership has been featured on CNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, Forbes, TechCrunch, CNN, WSJ, Inc., Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, and more.
You can find her on Twitter: . Blog: ekaterinawalter (dot) com
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Allan Szymczyk and Jan Verwijs met during an MBA programme in a class on Corporate Social Responsibility and decided to see if they could design a profit making business that benefits society and not just shareholders.
They have created Agora which is a democratic company, community led, where anyone who joins can take part in the decision making process and benefit from the profits that are created.
So far the community has decided on a constitution and a product - a flavoured water branded “99% Guiltless”. When the beverage is in production, community members who nominate independent retailers who agree to stock the product will benefit from the profits from those sales.
Listen as Allan and Jan explain their vision and how it is working so far;
My Agora has a Facebook Page a Linkedin Page a Twitter Account and its own YouTube Channel where some of the decision making processes are demonstrated.
While this is a big experiment in business, Allan and Jan are using social channels to connect with people who are interested in joining in the experiment and bringing them into the forum where they can help to make the decisions.
It’s a fascinating story and one I’m sure we’ll revisit but in the meantime, we hope you’ll join the experiment and tell us your experiences!
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Social Media Strategy Director at Starcom MediaVest Group, Mat talks about paid and earned content, native advertising, Twitter cards, tagging content for different platforms and much, much more.
Beginning his career nearly two decades ago at creative hotshop AKQA he went on to help set up Tribal DDB London as Commercial Manager in which role he helped launch the first website for Number 10 Downing Street.
He was one of the founders of the social media agency RMM where among other clients he worked for the Queen (whom he never got to meet). Prior to joining SMV Group, he was Global Head of Digital for the US-owned communications agency network, Porter Novelli.
He has held regional and global board director roles, or been a director of his own companies, since 1999.
You can follow Mat’s excellent blog The Magic Bean Laboratory find him on Twitter as , on Google+ and on LinkedIn
In his interview Mat mentions Yoast SEO Plugin JM Twitter Cards and exciting distribution companies Outbrain and Taboola
We’ve reached a new era for Facebook marketing.Anyone who uses Facebook for business needs to read and listen to this:
It’s long been understood by Facebook page administrators that they could expect to reach a maximum of of only 16% of their fans with any given status update. Lately this figure has dropped to between 3% and 6% and rumour has it that this will be further reduced to just 1% or 2% in the near future.
Many blogs and posts have been written on how to beat the system - all with little effect.
In his e-book “”Addressing Facebook Zero”, Paul Sutton has asked a number of highly respected Facebook marketers and community managers for their opinions on the future of Facebook marketing.
Paul is Head of Social Communications at Bottle PR, who have Honda and Golden Wonder among their clients.
Contributors to the e-book include Brian Carter, Emeric Ernoult, Danny Whatmough, Luke Williams, Eb Adeyeri and Alex Pearmain.
In this interview Paul talks to us about the ideas put forward in the book and what this means for the future of marketing on Facebook.
You can download the ebook here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/je871i4l3jrsube/Addressing%20Facebook%20Zero.pdf
Follow Paul on Twitter
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Social listening is a skill we all need to learnAnna Marsden is a Director of Social-i-Media a whole media communications company offering social media training and consultancy, content marketing, public relations, copy-writing and media advocacy. Anna talks to us about the free tools and some premium ones that help us to listen effectively so that we can pick up opportunities, monitor what’s being said about us, our brand, competitors or clients and respond in a timely way to requests for help or information. From Google alerts and Google analytics to hashtags and Hootsuite, Anna shares solid, practical advice that businesses of every type and size will find useful.
Anna has very kindly written a blog post adding lots more details to her interview - read it on the Social-i-Media website.
Follow Anna on Twitter and and all the other social networks!
Come and join our communities on LinkedIn and Google Plus
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Nathalie Nahai The Web Psychologist and author of Webs of Influence explains why brands have to relinquish control of their brand story to their customers.
On the basis that customers are talking about them anyway, the idea is to get in there and provide ways to tell their experience with the brand.
Nathalie gives several examples of how different types of business can use story telling to help their customers identify with the brand, from plumbers and boiler fixers to fashion.
One of these is the Fashion Brand Nasty Gal that uses Olapic to get fans to upload their own pictures to their Facebook Page.
Nathalie also takes us through the 12 steps of story telling and shows how to apply this to our websites in order to draw people in and get them to identify with what we do.
Connect with Nathalie on Twitter
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Steer is a London based technology education startup that teaches people how to code and builds useful products for beginner programmers. Steer was founded to improve technology education around the world and create a wider understanding of web development.
We talk to Co-founder and CEO Amelia Humfress about the growing desire to learn coding and the implications this has for the future. We also cover the theory of creativity, introversion v extraversion, gender politics, management styles and much, much more!
In the interview Amelia mentions the book HTML and CSS: Design and Build Web Sites by Jon Duckett
Follow Amelia on Twitter and
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David Cushman is a world leader in the power of the network and how its impact changes everything. This manifests itself in his work in Open Business - an holistic, strategic framework for delivering the change demanded by a world insisting on ever greater connectedness, openness and meaningful relationships with customers.
Open Business is the art of making partners of customers. It is the most effective route to rebuilding the trust so many brands, organisations and institutions need.
David has been described as one of the world’s finest marketers by E-Consultancy and his blog, fasterfuture.blogspot.com is ranked among the UK’s Top 20 Marketing Blogs by Adage.com. He was ranked #3 in PR Week’s Power Players of Social Media.
In this interview David shares some examples of companies adopting the principles of open business from Tesco - see their new Core Purpose and Values - and Giffgaff and explains why all business benefit from moving to this style of business.
He makes the useful distinction between social business (using social tools and networks)and open business (adopting different behaviour and culture).
Connect with David on Linkedin and Twitter and use the hashtag #openbusiness to follow his talks and blogs.
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David Spark of Spark Media Solutions got tired of being told, by people he didn’t know, what MORE he should be doing in social media so decided to ask some of the smartest people in the business that he knows and admires what we should STOP doing.
The result is an entertaining “how-not-to” social media guide that left me wondering how some of these things were ever thought to be acceptable in the first place. (Any why so many social media marketing agencies use and recommend them).
In an unashamed rant David talks us through some of the items that are no longer acceptable to do on social media.
You can get the ebook FREE here and follow David on Twitter
These are my favourites:
What are yours?
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