If you want a book that's going to tell you to get into social media for the sake of it, put this one back on the shelf. It isn't for you. If you want to read a book eulogizing or even evangelizing a particular technology, forget it: this isn't it. My aim is to inform you what's out there in terms of social media and help you assess what it can do for your business, then how to integrate the idea into your work. The first step is always to think about your own customers and how they're going to interact with you ('interact' does sound like jargon but in this case it fits). Do they walk in and talk to you? Phone, email, write?
Don't get me wrong, I'm itching to tell you how other people have used social media to colossal advantage. I can certainly tell you how to sign up for the various flavours of network you can join, and by the time you've finished the third chapter you'll know which one's which. As we go to print, Facebook is the biggest and Twitter has the highest profile, mostly due to a load of celebrities getting involved on both sides of the Atlantic. YouTube is the one that lets you put videos up, as does Bebo, but that's primarily aimed at a younger audience. We'll go into more depth later on, when I'll tell you all about these networks, how they started up and indeed how their aims have changed over the years. And I can point you to ways of matching networks to your business needs. A lot of books make the assumption that you must sign up for these things, but frankly I don't accept that. When such networks are right they can work spectacularly. When they're not, they don't.
Another issue with writing a definitive guide to social media is that the landscape changes, and it changes really quickly. Twitter is currently flavour of the month so it crops up a lot in the preface. If I'd been writing three years ago I'd have been telling you about this odd new idea where you put up a really brief summary of exactly what you're doing at the moment – right now – and through which your friends and family can keep in touch. Nowhere was there any idea of two-way conversation, Twitter was a series of announcements and that was it. Fast forward to the present day and we find that users have taken over; they insisted on being able to write responses to what people were doing and the company accommodated them. So you can twitter (or tweet) to an audience who are known to you, but you're just as likely to hook up with a complete stranger (but someone with whom you share a lot in common professionally or in terms of interests) as with someone you already talk to regularly. It's become a huge worldwide conversation and there are even people who think it's a better search engine than Google (it's probably not, and we'll look at why this is later on). Likewise, if I'd been writing about Facebook initially I'd have been talking about something for graduates only. It's now for anyone who wants to sign up but, unlike Twitter, it tries to insist you connect with people you actually know. I mean really know, people you've met.
The networks themselves change in their relative importance over time as well. A few years ago we'd have been talking about FriendsReunited a lot more than we will be in this book (it's just been put up for sale by ITV, which bought it from its founders a few years back; who knows, in a future edition we may yet be talking about it as a major player again). It's only a guess, but by the time this book sees publication I'd be very surprised if some of the initial Twittermania hadn't subsided. The history of social media and who's up and who's down is a fascinating subject, like the interplay between the players in any emerging industry. We'll be touching on it as a subject, but this book isn't intended as a comprehensive history of who's done what.
Instead, the book is aimed at business owners. Its main purpose is to offer a practical guide on how to use social media as part of your business. It looks at the networks and the technology of course, it would be nonsensical to attempt this sort of book without addressing those issues, but unlike some of the books on the market it looks directly at where these elements should fit into a good business plan. It won't assume you know how each connection is made with each social networking website, and it won't assume you're particularly interested in the technical jiggery-pokery that makes high-definition video recording so affordable and easy, nor how the data is compressed to get it onto YouTube without it taking a week to load. I'm going to assume you're just not interested in that stuff and that you'd prefer for me to:
Get you familiar with YouTube and how to upload a video (and embed it onto your own site).
Demystify Facebook and get you comfortable with setting up a profile and what to put on it.
Ditto MySpace, Twitter and the rest.
Assessing which, if any, of these networks are going to do your business any good and how you might measure the return on the time you'll be investing.
Before we get into that, though, it's worth having a look at how social networking actually arose, and why it's a very old idea indeed.
I keep reading about how wonderfully thrilling and new the social networking area is. It's opened up the Internet to everyone, made the highest-flown celebrity available for a quick chat as long as you're not an obvious timewaster or aggressive, and it brings with it all sorts of new business rules and metrics.
But in fact I've been using this stuff since 1993 when I went freelance, and I have colleagues who've been using it in one form or another since the late 1980s. And it's very important to understand also that there are no new rules.
I've given talks about social networking to a number of organizations and I always get asked one or two questions about how you work with employees in this strange new environment. My answer is always the same: it isn't strange, it isn't new, it's the same employees as before working in the same environment. They just have a few new tools. In Chapter 1 we'll look at some specific examples of people who've assumed there is some new magic going on and that all the business sense you had before no longer applies, but for the moment I'd like to consider what happened around the turn of the century: the dot-com boom.
That was the last time people assumed there was some sort of new business paradigm. The exact moment I realized this was a huge mistake was when Time Warner bought Internet company AOL; the financial analysts suddenly had to revalue AOL (at a lower figure) because it had stepped into 'real' business and therefore needed to adhere to standard business rules rather than those that had evolved for dot-coms. Although the merger went ahead, inevitably many other dot-coms crashed as the commercial reality set in. It's the same this time around: social media need to be part of, not separate from, the commercial realities on which your business is based.
OK, so why do I say people have been using social networks since the late 1980s? In 1989 I started my first job as a trainee journalist on a computer publication in the UK, called MicroScope. Pedants will be aware that the Internet and in particular the technologies on which the World Wide Web was based were already around in primitive form, but for our purposes, even in a computer magazine, there was basically no such thing as an Internet just yet. We received copy from our contributors by post on floppy disks and our computers weren't even networked internally, we passed disks around. The system wasn't yet based on Windows and any thought of databases was best left to the experts.
By this stage any younger readers will be in tears at the deprivation we all suffered, but the reason I paint this picture is because of something one of the staff was doing in the corner. He was the quiet one and he had a job title that seemed to me a bit made up. But occasionally, someone would ask him a question and he'd come up with the answer a bit later without leaving his desk. I didn't understand how but he explained, when he felt like it, that he was 'On Kicks'. I later found out that he was actually accessing a system called Cix – Compulink Information eXchange – from his computer, logging in through the phone line.
Cix was – and is, you can still find it at www.cixonline.co.uk – a network of like-minded people, primarily technology types because they were the only people who knew how to work a modem (a gadget that predated broadband, for any really young readers) who'd log on for chat and information. (Beginning to sound familiar?)
It was text only, no pretty pictures, and it was divided up into 'conferences' (remember this is before Internet forums or anything like that) in various subject areas. There was 'Hacks' for journalists and more computing conferences than you'd really want to know about. It was into these conferences that my colleague would post his questions. If this sounds like a less random version of Twitter, then that's because the principle is similar.
I signed up for Cix when I went freelance in 1993. I discovered that you could use it to send files to people so I could work right up to the deadline. Then I found that you could also send to people who were not on Cix. That's because it was operating not only its own conferencing system but an Internet Service Provider business, very new stuff at the time. Cix was a really useful package and it even had its own front end, which allowed me to log on, download a load of messages and log off, which was useful before broadband to avoid clogging up the phone line.
However, the idea of a more visually interesting environment was taking root as computing was becoming more sophisticated and affordable. In the early 1990s company called CompuServe arrived in the UK. To the small number of us who used Cix the principle looked very similar; you dialled into the site and it put you through to lots of conferences – or forums, as they were called in CompuServe-ese. There were also a load of news services that were equally helpful, and the whole thing was laid out in a more visually appealing manner. If you were clever you could get a reader to take the messages off CompuServe and free up your phone line while you read them, much like you could with Cix. And the idea of joining an interest group online, being part of a community and being able to ask questions or get paid work from other journalists (or find a good supplier for your IT kit: I still use the computer seller I found on Cix many years ago and he's never let me down, email him on [email protected] and he'll find whatever you're looking for) was the same.
CompuServe also had a gateway into something called the World Wide Web. I took a look once and didn't like it much, it was a bit of a free-for-all and you'd get a load of these 'website' things that basically said: 'Hi, I'm Larry and this is my dog.'
This started to change very slightly in 1995 with the emergence of America Online, now called simply AOL. Initially the company had the idea of putting together its own news content, and indeed in 1996 it hired me for a couple of years to put its technology news feed together and write an analysis piece every week (territorial claim no. 1: this must make me one of the first journalists in the UK paid to write specifically for online media). AOL also had forums for people in certain interest groups; technology types and a load of Star Trek fans. You could, again, do the social network thing in AOL's closed network. But before too long it became apparent that the real interest was in getting people onto the Internet.
There were other developments, like Internet forums and newsgroups, but everything became more sophisticated and easier when broadband arrived in the early 2000s. There was no financial penalty involved if you stayed online for ages, unlike in the old dial-up days, so taking part in an online forum no longer cost the earth or blocked your phone line.
It's against this backdrop that you can observe FriendsReunited, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Twitter and all the others coming into their own. The idea that they're desperately new, though, is plain misguided. The idea of social networking wasn't new, what had changed was the phenomenal ease of doing it and of course the numbers of people involved were growing exponentially. Now everything's gone very Web 2.0.
You'll have heard a lot of people talking about Web 2.0. It's a way of describing the way the Internet is at the moment. Personally I hate the term: it suggests there's been a whole new version of the web (which is nonsense) and that there's a Web 3.0 on the way (I'm not aware of anyone planning one, but we can speculate on when the marketeers will start using that term).
What the proponents of Web 2.0 claim is that it signifies people starting to take part in what happened on the Internet, rather than absorbing it passively. When the Internet began being used widely in the 1990s, most businesses that had catalogues put them online, but your engagement was limited to putting your credit card details in. This started to change a little around the end of the last century (one day I'm going to feel really old writing sentences like that). People like Amazon let people put reviews of books and DVDs onto its site (quite brilliantly, it discovered reviewers would do this for no money), as did a few other sites, and then blogs emerged.
A blog, or web log, is more or less an online diary. The idea was that people would announce things that were interesting to them, share links to other interesting bits on the web and hopefully, although not necessarily, invite comments from other people. This is where Web 2.0 originated as far as I can see, when people started being part of the action. The debate about the 'democratization' of media also escalated as blogs expanded: what is the value of 'proper' journalists if so-called citizen journalists, or bloggers, are offering equal coverage?
The emergence of Facebook, Twitter and other social media applications amplified this effect. In December 2005 there was an explosion in Buncefield, UK. Many of the photographs in the press came from 'citizen snappers': people taking their own photos and sending them to the news agencies or increasingly putting them on photo sharing websites. As a more sinister example, in late 2008 there was a bomb in Mumbai and people reported what was happening through their Twitter accounts. The authorities asked them to stop because they were telling anyone who cared to log on exactly where the soldiers were going and where they were about to attack, risking giving the terrorists advance notice of where the city was most vulnerable.
My guess is that we'll be saying we're in Web 3.0 when we can all receive video and TV on demand through the Internet in super-high definition or 3D (I've seen it demonstrated and it's pretty impressive). That's a fair way off now and I really wouldn't worry about it: there may or may not be ways of taking advantage of that later.
What matters to a business owner is that when someone offers to make your website very Web 2.0, you need to know that they might not do much except put a blog on it (and this is a blog you'll be expected to write frequently, or else it's going to start looking very underused very quickly). Just as you need to be aware of what a mechanic's going to do to your car and why an oil change isn't worth thousands, you also need to know what some of the terms we'll be discussing mean and, above all, what you can expect from someone who wants to build your business around them.
People seem to mean different things when they talk about social networks. Just so we're sure we all know what we're talking about, my definition appears on the left.
Note
A social network is an Internet-based tool that allows the reader to engage with the writer or with a community online and in public.
So your existing website probably isn't socially networked; Twitter and the rest are. A blog that allows comments is something we'll certainly look at; Wikipedia we'll mention because it's useful and has its pitfalls; whereas introducing your own wiki for your organization, in which you and a load of writers can add to the various definitions of terms and build up your own knowledge bank, is not public enough to be useful to enough readers for us to look at in a book like this. Basically, if you have specialist requirements, you need to talk to a specialist. This book will be about the stuff that's easy to get at and use.
Before we plunge into Chapter 1 I need to make one thing clear: this is a book about social networking technology as it can be applied to a business. You knew that. But it's important to stress that a lot of what social networking and Web 2.0 can achieve is also possible without using the Internet at all. The results and the scale will be different, but customer feedback has a long history.
For example, a lot of television programmes invite people to text comments in, and they have a blog or forum on which viewers can make comments. You may think this is new, but the BBC in the UK has run a programme called Points of View for decades, which invites viewers to write in – on paper, although now also email – and make their points, which get read out. Clearly, the programme allows for a lot less feedback than you'd get from an Internet forum, but it's there, nonetheless.
Likewise, the opportunity to comment on current affairs and news stories and join in a big conversation has been around for decades on both sides of the Atlantic in the form of radio phone-ins and letters pages in newspapers and magazines. The fact that now more people can participate because they have a medium that facilitates their inclusion rather than an editor cherry-picking something that fits the space doesn't make it revolutionary or new.
Think about your own customers. They interact with you somehow. If you run a restaurant their first point of contact is eating there; if they have a good experience they say so and come back, if they have a bad experience and they're British they say it's fine and just don't turn up again (American restaurant owners probably get a more honest response). If you're in a service industry you have feedback in different ways. Customers might recommend you, which is feedback; or you may hear some scuttlebutt about how your PA has halitosis if they don't like you, which is also feedback.
You might engage with customers and the public in all sorts of different ways. One company I spoke to before all this social media stuff happened made a point of paying for the cleaning of its local train station. This served two purposes: the community felt engaged by this organization brightening the place up, and any visitors came to a better-looking place to conduct their business.
The point I'm making is that although this book focuses on engaging with customers or indeed colleagues through electronic means, this needs to be part of your mix and not all you do. You run a garden centre and think your customers would respond better to a coffee morning than a blog? Great – spend your money that way. You run a consultancy and don't actually want to be perceived as having enough time to write a blog? Great, good reason, don't do it. But do find out what your customers are going to respond to, every time: don't just guess.
That's enough background. If you take anything away from this introduction, I hope it'll be something like:
This isn't a magic bullet for my business.
Using social networking, as long as it's appropriate, is an extension of what I'm already doing rather than something radical (so I don't have to be afraid of it!).
I need to build this into my business plan and know why I'm doing it: which is what Chapter 1 is about.