While I was away…
Well hello there.
I’ve been off, as you may know. I’ve returned to 413 emails, and many more items to read in my RSS reader…
Did you know, by the way, that when you accumulate more than one thousand items in your Google reader it gives up telling you exactly how many things you’ve got to read, and just says ‘1000?+’…
…it might as well say ‘more items than you’ll ever get through, idiot.’ Just because of that, I’m going to read every single one.
But until I get through all of those, I thought I’d just make a note of the things that are the first things I’ve got a sense of that went on…
i) Google W.A.V.E. = What A Vexing ExerciseThere was obviously a huge hoopla around Google Wave’s release, and it seems that some folks out there would have (and maybe did) put their grannies on eBay for an invite…
…and on that, I’d like to thank Graham and Simon for both getting me one…
Now, I’ve not honestly had the chance to use it ‘in anger’ yet, as it were. So I’m really only going on what a wide variety of other people have been saying…
By and large, the sense that I get is one of frustration, bemusement, annoyance… people are having a bit of a hard time coming to terms with what it is, what it can do, why it’s different etc. Why? Maybe two things contributed…
i) Lack of Patience – it was never going to be something that worked for everyone immediately, but maybe folk are just too used to finding ‘the next big thing’ online that you just ‘get’ in about 5 minutes.
ii) Crap Launch Strategy – dropping it in the laps of lots of people all at once isn’t helpful… instead of giving people invites to the equivalent of the first telephone (hello? anyone there? HELLO..?), maybe it should have been an invite to a few folk join a wave that existed already…
However, everyone’s still talking about it, so maybe that was the goal… I’m going to try out some specific projects on it, and see how using it properly pans out.
If you’re still unsure what it is, This video I found via Fiona will give you a simple overview…
ii) Foursquare comes to London
I’ve been quite excited about Foursquare for a while. In their own words, Foursquare is “all about helping you find new ways to explore the city. We’ll help you meet up with your friends and let you earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people.”
Basically, when you go to a bar/restaurant/coffee shop etc, you ‘check in’ using Foursquare. You get points for checking in, and you can achieve different badges for checking in for all sorts of different reasons… see the list here.
You can compete with your friends to earn points, get rare and better badges and so on. So, on the face of it, it’s a fun local game you play with your friends…
It’s this sort of thing that I think means Foursquare could have a big, big future… advertisers have spent years trying to think of different ways to encourage people to visit their shops, restaurants, venues. This offers a way not only to find out how many people visit, but to create ways that encourage them to do so more often, and reward them for being the most frequent visitors too. It certainly gives us an insight into how GPS might be used in future.
iii) IPA Social was… very social indeed
After spending six months working on the project, it was a bit of a shame to miss the event, but the IPA Social event on the 6th October went off very well indeed it seems… some quotes from a few things people posted afterwards…
“Every strategist and brand owner needs to understand social, and what role it should play in building their brand. A social strategy should be an integral part of a brand and comms strategy, and should sit across every discipline within an organisation – it can’t just be the responsibility of the social media manager. That’s not to say there isn’t a role for social specialists. Implementing a social strategy requires a robust understanding of how to behave in the social space, and experience in these craft skills counts for a lot. Specialist practitioners implement media planning and buying, advertising creation, packaging design, PR, POS, call centre operations, and pretty much every aspect of implementing a brand strategy you can think of. Social’s no different – specialist implementation is both valuable and necessary.”
“It seems that the term
social media itself is counter productive – a fundamental change in how
people are able to communicate with each other will naturally have
knock-on effects to all businesses that deal with communications. But
it will affect each differently. So ‘social media’ means something
different to an ad agency than to a PR agency because it impacts what
they have traditionally done in different ways. So the advice that
clients get from their roster is that ‘social media’ means a range of
different things.”
“In the future, I’d predict only seeing agencies getting involved in
campaign activity, with the ongoing rumble of conversation being
handled purely client-side. All it requires is an understanding of how
to use the various platforms appropriately; no specialist skills are
required to participate to the full. In the beginning, agencies will be
needed to help out educating their clients on how to use the platforms
with case studies and such, but that should be the extent of it.”
So, what next for IPA Social? Well, if you want to find out, and get ivolved, maybe you should join in the conversation here on the IPA Social facebook group…
Meanwhile, I’ll get on with reading 1000+ articles… or maybe I’ll just hit ‘mark all as read’… 🙂
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