20/08 Hindsight: A Social Media Year

Okay, you got me red-handed: I didn’t mean to do this.
Not real Social Media.
I get retail marketing – even emarketing – but a year down a line of friends, followers, forays and fuck-ups and I’ve tripped over the truth without even meaning to.
What do I mean? Well…

For example: -

In the pub after Amplified08, @Yellowpark commented that he’d not heard of Forbidden Planet until Twitter – iconising how the openness of Social Media brings niche Brands like FP onto the ‘High Street’ of the web. For us, successful marketing isn’t selling SF to fanboys – it’s throwing the doors wide and saying ‘everyone can come here’. And that ‘everyone’ is bigger than we could’ve imagined.

For example: -

This year has seen the FP Megastore become a satellite Hub for London’s Twitterers. They’re at every signing; at big events, they add their own skills and insights to the on-web coverage. Social Media becomes its own beacon – the more they enthuse, the more enthusiasm is generated and the more it broadcasts – and the more it feeds back, and so on.

Believe in what you do – and Social Media becomes the field that surrounds your magnet. All you need is passion, conviction and sincerity.

For example: -

There’s always talk about the ‘human face on the Brand’, about ‘accessibility’– for a retailer, it’s the web version of standing on the shop floor. It’s a calculated gamble – on the one hand, you’re the first target when the e-mud starts flying; on the other, you reach friends, customers, guests and clients personally. And these are the people that will come back – to the store, to the site. Social Media is about hands-on Customer Service – and it matters.

For example: -

The failure of The Headless Bartman at SxSW created the MonQee, a classic example of out-of-the-box marketeering that caught the web’s imagination and went rapidly Viral. Social Media Marketing, coupled with genuine creativity, thrashes the pants off any amount of ordinary advertising.

As a personal footnote, 2008 has seen me return (at last!) to my ‘real’ job – to being back at the core of things, to taking full responsibility for promotion and event organisation at Forbidden Planet. From re-entering the SF fan scene at Orbital to my growing contacts lists on FaceBook and LinkedIN, to my recent interview with Tony at StarShipSofa… as this year comes to a close, I’ve realised something: -

Y’know what? I get it.
Y’know something else? It never was rocket science.

The big secret to Social Media Marketing? It’s common bloody sense – sling in a little humanity and a little respect (and a big ol’ bag o’comics) and there: Twitter’s your Uncle.

Honestly: how hard was that?

So.Me, So.You, So What?

So. What were you doing, the Night Before The Net?

I was in the pub. I was round my mates’. I was running round with a sword in all weathers. I was singing round bonfires and waking up, sweating under canvas, still young enough to be hangover free.

My mates were the most important things in the world – and we moved mountains.

Cue a post that’s been stewing for weeks.

It started the evening I saw ‘City of Men’ (appropriately a very human and empathic film); it’s spanned a couple of Friday mornings at the Tuttle and got pissed at the MOO Party. It’s had lunch in Hyde Park with @markmedia and @iankath and it’s hit crystallisation upon realising that @annohio, always Champion of the Social, has moved her blog.

Whatever sites, platforms, methods of online communication we choose - they’re just the framework.

The framework for the people.

Somehow, I had lost this.

Attending the Tuttle has been a slow sartori. Friday mornings at the Coach and Horses offer coffee, croissant and conversation – and a range of people who cover every angle, business and level of experience. It’s encouraging and encompassing and there’s always someone with an answer.

London, then, has a very strong Social Media community – precisely because ‘hub’ events like the MOO Party bring us all together, face-to-face; they reinforce existing bonds, forge new ones and provide a riverhead for ideas and motion.

It’s common sense, isn’t it?

So: how did I lose sight of the First Rule?

If you follow my Tweets, you probably know I can’t get to many of these events. In the great arena of ‘be noticed: be seen!’ I rattle my tin mug up and down The Bars of SAHM and rely on Friday avatars to make up my social shortfall.

My web community has kept me sane, given me focus, helped my business and occasionally got me into mischief…

…but somehow, like a bad retail manager, I’d lost touch with the shop floor – the basics I instinctively understood in my fighting-Viking twenties.

Thanks to a little freedom, I finally have them back.

The ‘social’ in Social Media means ‘people’ – it means being sat in the pub, talking it up after your second pint. It means meeting-up with those in your city and tweeting-up with those stopping by; it means getting off your geeky arse and getting out from behind your screen.

I remember now.

This isn’t So.Me – this is So.Cial.

I can be a right fucking idiot, sometimes.

Flying at 10,000 Tweets

It’s ubiquitous, isn’t it – I’ve been on Twitter, now, just short of a year and have passed the miracle milestone… the blog flows from the number just as my network of contacts flows from one site to the next.
So: this is the post where I reminisce, list what I’ve learned, whom I’ve met, the experiences, the expected and the unexpected that I’ve braved since the bird’s beak first bit.
Well, the first thing is the learning process is continuous, of course; the amphitheatre of information that surrounds the Twitter hub is ever-changing; there will always be something else to understand.
My personal victories have been small things – technical fixits, firing tweets and utterz from FP events into nothingness, dusting off knowledge from my long-mothballed degree and a recent magical moment when joec0914 sold Twitter, lock, ‘bot and global potential, to my sceptical partner with this.
There have been wonderful flashes when I’ve inspired a friend – or they me – and times I’ve been overwhelmed by the responses of my friends to the words ‘Forbidden Planet’. That first ‘what am I doing here?’ blog post is now quite charmingly naïve.
Dig a little deeper, though, and I catch a realisation like the early Twitter bird catches the worm: what I’ve learned isn’t a long list of little things – it’s one very simple one.
Focus.
Why is it easier to motivate myself to do something for someone else? For five hundred someone elses?
To phrase it another way: how many of us cook a full dinner when there’s only us in the house..?
Every person who responds to my blind tweets from a Forbidden Planet signing is making my individual challenge easier to overcome – and if I expand that realisation fractally through the twitterverse, our amphitheatre is filled with a thousand thousand tiny motes of personal empowerment.
And each one carries someone forward to meet their own challenge.
Okay, okay, it’s pretty and it’s visual; it dazzles with my own Danacea-branded idealism… Putting my shades on for a second: this is still a ‘What I’ve learned so far’ blog post – and the bottom of those rising seats is a place we’ve all sat to navel-gaze...
Yep – fluff.
As Twitter grows, so the fractal pattern multiplies. And here’s one of the things I haven’t learned – why our community doesn’t fragment.
My ‘Viking’ past is known to some; the bonds that tied the friendships of my twenties together were enormously powerful and remain strong to this day. But ten years in re-enactment taught me that no group grows beyond two dozen people – it divides, cliques form, social stresses and power struggles begin.
Why is Twitter (largely) immune?
I don’t have an answer to this; I’m intrigued. Is it because there’s no single leader – people earn their own respect? Is it because our Twitter friends are three-quarters real; soft-focus, seen through the light of the screen? Is it because it’s self-policing, the follower/following bonds are organic and the flow of communication voluntary?
Or it is simply because we can turn it off when it gets too much?