One of the first people to read my book, 'This Is Social Media', has put a review on Amazon. She's a genuine reviewer in spite of the name - she got in touch with a followup question so I know she's real! - and naturally I couldn't be more delighted with the view she has expressed.

I'll get back to some more serious blogging and updating soon I promise - but for the moment, I've got a book out and at least one of the readers has gone public on liking it (as have a few Tweeters and emailers), so I'm just enjoying the day..!

Tags: Guy Clapperton, this is social media, twitter, facebook

Now this is hilariously stupid. the Daily Telegraph, often a respected newspaper in the UK, has published a report based on scientific findings (COUGH) that suggests you can tell whether someone is gay by looking at their Facebook 'friends'. Apparently, the higher per centage of your followers are gay, the more likely you are to be gay yourself.

So hold on, this research is now saying I can't associate with homosexual men without everybody jumping to scientifically-evidenced conclusions? I'm not persuaded by this. I haven't actually audited the male/female balance of my online contacts but I can assure you I'd remain male regardless of the outcome of any such check; I don't honestly think the sexuality of my contacts would have any bearing on my own either. Come to think of it, unless I've actually met them with a partner I don't think I actually know the sexuality of many of my contacts. I'm an unfriendly git like that, what can I tell you?

The other thing that bothers me about this new research is that it works only on gay men. Lesbians and bisexuals, sorry and all that, but apparently you're undetectable by your Facebook pals, it's only gay men who stand out. Which, to me, makes the whole exercise a little bit value-less.

In fact I'm straining my brain more than a little trying to work out why I'd need to know a contact's sexuality in the first place...

Tags: facebook, gay

Facebook has launched Facebook Lite at last. You can post brief messages and reply to those already online. It's supposed to be for people with low bandwidth.

For some reason it feels familiar and (wait for it, big joke coming) I'm all a-Twitter about exactly why. Arf, arf.

Tags: facebook, twitter

Guy Clapperton and former CRF colleague Martin Williams form a new start-up, In-Take Media, working on profiling best employers through social media Read More...

Tags: Guy Clapperton, martin williams, in-take, in-take media, in-take media limited, twitter, facebook, youtube

I have a book on social media coming out in September (called 'This Is Social Media, order it from my book page) and I've been a media trainer since 2002.

A number of PR people have asked whether I could talk to them about social media so I put a note on a forum seeking to set up a seminar on the subject. I was hoping for about 5 responses if I was lucky. I've actually had 15. So I'm setting up at least 2 dates, 10th and 17th August, both in the morning.

Since it's been less than 48 hours since I put the first note out I thought it might be worth telling people a bit more and putting it on this site in case there's any more interest.

Topics I'd be seeking to cover during the mornings will include:

The basics: who's who in social networking and which suits you/your client
Customer engagement
Journalist engagement
Your website, your client's website - what should go on them?
Corporate blogging: why, who should do it - and who shouldn't
Corporate Twitter - ditto
Managing reputations and brands through social media
Marketing social media
Evaluating social media performance and tracking your success (and that of your client)

That ought to keep us going for a morning or so. The charge will be £150 per head excluding VAT.

So if anyone's interested and hasn't let me know a date they'd prefer yet, (10th Aug, 17 Aug or 'a later date please') do drop me an email or fill in the form below and I'll book you in.

Tags: social media, twitter, facebook, seminar, Guy Clapperton

Primark has joined the many organisations that has had to look into people using social networks - in this case Facebook - to insult their customers. The full story is on the BrandRepublic blog, and it’s worth clicking the links to read the site’s previous coverage on Waitrose and other brands whose staff have committed the same errors.

In my book, out in October in case I hadn’t mentioned it at least 100 times, I advise readers to put some sort of clause in the contract about social networking; nothing as draconian as I’ve reported here but something that states people should be sensible. The only thing that bothers me about this is that employers should already be covered; any sensible contract of employment will have clauses about not bringing the organisation into disrepute, and that would include not calling the customers pikeys or twats. I’d have thought.

In fact this should be down to common sense. Nobody who insults retail customers in this way should expect to work for long in retail. Maybe the overriding rule should be not to employ anyone who’s clearly too stupid to be let loose in public with the English Language at their disposal.

That might take care of it.

Tags: primark, social media, facebook

I’ve been accused of spamming on Twitter.

No, no, it’s no use defending me, it’s probably right. There was this competition from the people at Moonfruit in which you retweet a message of theirs and you might, just might, win a Macbook laptop. Now, I’m never one to pass up a chance to win something worth hundreds, particularly when I’ve just bought one the previous day (I could wipe out the spend completely, think about it) - so of course I entered.

And immediately someone on Twitter retweeted it. Fair enough, it’s an open contest. But then someone said either I or the Moonfruit people were spamming everybody.

It’s certainly the case that I was repeating what someone else said, to people who didn’t necessarily want to see it. It’s equally true that other people might want to enter the thing and possibly win. (In fact it’s possible that the complainer will win, which would be a bit ironic).

I don’t know about this one. One retweet and one complaint probably cancel each other out. But it’ll be interesting to see whether this sort of promotion (from someone who often adds value to the Twitter community, I should add) will be popular in a year’s time.

Tags: twitter, facebook

So, an employer has asked job candidates to hand over their passwords for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and just about anything else of which they might be a member as a matter of course. You don’t believe me? Have a look here.

This is of course appalling. You should no more have to hand over your social network details to someone who employs you than you should hand over the password to your online bank. You are allowed a private life.

Of course, the employer in turn is allowed to ensure that you don’t bring them into disrepute, and if you do so then you may expect to lose your job. But then, every contract of employment I’ve ever seen already takes that into account. I’m not aware of any need for new rules for the new media.

I’d be very interested, as well as somewhat disturbed, to hear from anyone who’s been asked anything similar.

Tags: privacy, twitter, facebook, social media, social network

There is some excellent sense in this blog entry from Joanne Jacobs about social media experts. I come across them often - people who claim expertise in social networking and then when you ask for a bit more depth they go all shy and - whisper it gently - you realise just how little they can do.

The reasons for this include the fact that anyone can style themselves as an expert, and believe me journalists can be the worst. Jacobs makes this point and criticises people whose only experience is as a journalist. I have to defend my corner a little here as I’m writing a book on social networking and in my view ‘a writer who can make this comprehensible’ is just the chap for such a job.

It would be good if there were some sort of accreditation scheme for experts. You could have different levels of expert - I’d be very pleased if my own pockets of knowledge of the field could have some sort of qualifier like ‘follower and expert commentator’ whereas Jacobs and her ilk might come out as ‘consultant for coal-face social networking’, for example.

If something like that doesn’t happen soon then Joanne’s first complaint - that critics constantly carp at social media experts because their expertise can be so questionable, is going to become a truism rather than a revelation. It’s a bit like being a consultant I suspect - until someone asks what exactly you mean by that there’s no way of telling a brain surgeon from someone who does really low-level unqualified stuff.

Tags: social media, social network, facebook, twitter, plaxo, linkedin

Well, that was probably Twitter’s worst day so far. The hour or so’s outage in the evening we could understand but the idea that we couldn’t use the system as we’d done so far was too much for some people.

OK, you might not have seen it. To explain briefly: at the moment, if you reply to someone’s Tweet, they see your response whether they’re following you or not. Yesterday Twitter announced it would stop this happening unless they were following you - so if the first word of one of my Tweets was @stephenfry (to use a very famous example) he would see it but if he replied to me then nobody who wasn’t following me would see it. The @ signifies the message is directed to him.

Mr. Fry’s followers might well be mightily relieved at this, but celebrities aside there were a lot of objections. Suppose someone needed help with a bit of information and you were able to respond with something that would be useful to many people? Unless your addressee’s follower happened to be following you they would no longer see it. They’d miss stuff, the banter, the information, for many the whole point of being on Twitter.

Later in the day it transpired that the tweak was because the existing model wasn’t particularly scalable. So they issued a cover story about making life easier for users when it wasn’t about any such thing. That’s a bit naughty.

The real issue that came out, though, was about the anger of Twitter customers when they found they were being told about a change to the system that they didn’t much like. There was fury, a while stream of messages with the Twitterfail tag emerged - and all because people didn’t like a change Twitter had made.

Twitter’s decision to fudge the reasons for the change was of course a mistake. Never, ever talk down to your customers. I can’t help but feel, however, that a lot of users have missed a very important point about Twitter, same as the Facebook customers missed a couple of months back when it changed its interface.

It doesn’t belong to us. It’s someone else’s playground and they’re allowing us to play in it.

This is a bit of a tough message. It appears to go against the idea of social networking, of sharing, The fact is, however, that Twitter is a private company owned by its founders. Its value is of course in its ability to open itself up to others, which can lead to the illusion that it’s somehow ‘ours’ and that we can complain when it changes in a way we don’t like or of which we don’t approve. But in reality we can’t. We’re there by someone else’s invitation. We’re not even paying customers.

Of course, the wise owner will listen to his or her non-paying guests and won’t want to risk destroying their newly-valuable (they hope) piece of virtual real estate by angering them. Nonetheless the sheer anger, the irritation with the fact of being unable to control everything that happened on Twitter, that we witnessed yesterday looks a little misplaced to me. Biz Stone and his colleagues own Twitter and they let everyone else play with it. They may have been clumsy, they may have gone against what some people think they ought to be doing, but they’re honestly not the bad guys. They’re the little guys trying to make a little application serve the whole world. I don’t know them and this is pure speculation, but it could be that yesterday they started to feel a little overwhelmed by all this.

Tags: technology, twitter, social media, social network, twitterfail, facebook

Some excellent work on social media in retail comes from the Fresh Networks blog. People who don’t like links (apart from a few members of my family I can’t think of any) can have a look at the video here:

Retail 2.0 interviews from Sarah Eno on Vimeo.

To me there are a number of initial rules about retail and social media.

1. Use it as a test bed by all means.
2. If your customers aren’t using social media don’t expect them to start - keep a presence in your existing channels until it’s right to move permanently. It may never be,
3. Don’t just sell, sell, sell - the ‘social’ bit means engaging, not bludgeoning. So your model is Tupperware Parties rather than a High Street store.
4. Don’t underestimate the resources you’ll need - a blog with a couple of entries isn’t going to do as much as full engagement through Facebook or Twitter.

If I could bring out one suggestion above all others that’s not on the video then it would be ‘check your customer first’ - see what social networks they’re already using, if any. I’d follow this with ‘don’t guess, check’ - following an attempt to explain to my mother-in-law that I was writing a book about social networks and trying to tell her what they were - only to be met with a full and cutting critique of my Facebook page, which she’d inspected for herself and of which she thought I could be making better use. The moral is that your instincts as to what your customers might be using could well be wrong. Check, research, and tailor your social networking activities accordingly!

Tags: social media, tweet, twitter, facebook, retail

I like social media. I do like social media, social networking, whatever you want to call it. It’s just that sometimes people get it a little wrong.

Let me elaborate. They get the idea that people will want to know interesting stuff. Good. They find something on the Web. Great. They think someone else might want to know so they opt to share it. Right up until this point I’m with them.

Then they Facebook it - put it on their FB page. OK, still good. Then they link to their FB Page - not the original page - with some sort of scrunged social media site that aggregates links. At this stage they’re starting to lose the plot ever so slightly because if I come across their favourites on Digg, or Delicious, or whatever, I don’t want to be taken to a Facebook page, I want to go straight to whatever it was that’s piqued their fancy.

Then they Tweet the aggregator site. So to find whatever it was that interested them I have to receive their Tweet - no problem there - then click through to some daft aggregator site, work out how to bypass that, end up on their Facebook profile and eventually, very eventually, click through to a picture of a dog that can walk on its hind legs or something.

Sadly by that time I’ve lost the will to live. I’m seriously considering starting a campaign for straightforward links as a result of all this. I’d be intrigued to hear from anyone else who’s had similar experiences.

Tags: twitter, facebook, links, digg, delicious, tweet

So to the Techradar website, on which there is a list of ten crimes that will get you unfollowed on Twitter. Many of them make sense. Some of them, though, are damned silly. The first few are fine - not Tweeting too often (we all do it at first), but it’s at no. 3 that the thing starts to come unstuck. Don’t, it says, Retweet yourself. Why of course I won’t. I’ll just assume that everyone saw what I said the first time around and ignore the fact that some of the people with whom I’m trying to communicate might be around at a different time from the rest.

It’s no. 6 with which I really take issue, though. Don’t, it says, reply to celebrity Tweeters. In other words please take away from them every reason they had for being on Twitter in the first place. Certainly there will be one or two who’ll be there for their own glory but equally there are some who want to chat. Twitter and other social media is about bringing down the boundaries, but doing so in an environment the recipient of these messages can still control. The tone of this ‘rule’ would offend me if I were a celeb; it implies that they’re not real people and won’t respond if they’re approached in a reasonable, polite manner in a forum on which you expect to be approached. I’ve certainly had friendly words with a few of them and even more with non-celebs - the one thing they all share in common is that they’re people.

In fact the more I think about it the more I think this is silly snobbery.

Moving on. another one that gets to me is not asking people to retweet what you’ve said. OK, a lot of the time this can be self-serving and silly - but what if you really need help with something? Or what if you’re doing something for charity and would like to raise thousands rather than hundreds? It’s a crazy rule, simple as that. End of rant.

But what really gets to me is that someone feels they can tell ever

Tags: twitter, facebook, social network, nuisance, good practice, best practice

A Tweet from Sheamus Bennett (worth following if you’re interested in social media, click here if you’re on Twitter and you can follow him easily) alerts me to this excellent blog post on why we should be following the smaller Tweeters and not just aiming for the big numbers by following people with loads of followers. The arguments are solid; follow only the big hitters with hundreds of thousands of followers and they won’t have the time to see your Tweets, let alone respond to them.

I have another reason for following people with fewer followers. They may be new, they may be inexperienced but they may well have something to say. And that’s the whole idea of this social media thing - finding out what makes people tick, what they’re doing by all means but more particularly why they should bother doing it. You might well learn something - I certainly have. The thing is, some of the celebrities or high-profile bloggers - the Stephen Frys or Guy Kawasakis who use social media - also have a great deal to say and much of it is interesting. They also have massive media interest, though, so if they want something heard the chances are very good that they’ll find a way to get the message out there somehow. Someone will report it, which they may not in the case of the bead maker in the West Country I’m following, or the advocate of mothers returning to work. They have comparatively few followers but they always reply and they often offer a fresher perspective on matters than I’d have thought of by myself.

So yes, follow the non-celebs who some people describe as the smaller timers on Twitter. Not just because it can be profitable (but hey, why not!) - but because you might read something interesting that other people don’t get to see.

Tags: twitter, facebook, social network

Probably the most interesting thing about the case reported in the Guardian, in which a man in Korea has been acquitted of spreading falsehoods on the web, is the way it highlights the differences in culture and emphasises that the Web might make us look at the same thing but through many different sets of eyes. I sound like Marco Pierre White at his most cryptic, I know.

But it’s true. This Park guy sets himself up as an economic prophet. To a Western pair of eyes we see the word ‘prophet’ and already start to write him off as a chancer. He’s not serious, he’s calling himself a prophet, it’s a ludicrous title...but there it is. He’s one of these odd people you get from time to time who might, concievably, have something to say. Elsewhere it appears they take him seriously enough to take him to court when they find that some of his credentials are bogus.

There are areas in which it would be the same over here. Had he styled himself as an independent financial advisor in the UK without the right qualifications or offered actual financial advice without the right title there would have been regulatory questions to answer. But prophet? It sounds almost like guru. I hate to think of how many new media or social networking ‘gurus’ would be in serious trouble if they actually had to quantify their expertise.

Tags: blog, blogs, internet, web, on the web, twitter, facebook

I can’t tell you how relieved I was to read this blog entry from Edelman. Someone with a bit of clout has at last noticed that a great many of us are using Twitter, Facebook and loads of other stuff to announce absolutely everything about ourselves to a waiting world.

People have started to fall slightly foul of this, albeit nobody has confessed to anything too severe. A while back the estimable Twitterer Stephen Fry announced that he was stuck on a delayed flight, and when he arrived at the airport there were the paparazzi waiting to take his picture. OK, he’s a celebrity and if he announces his whereabouts in a public place he can take his chances, of course - he’s been perfectly affable about how he effectively set himself up for it in interviews since then.

More disturbingly, I’ve noticed a trend towards people mentioning that they’ve bought a swish new computer. I like doing that myself, although due to budgeting it’s going to be a while before I do it again (also due to the fact that the existing one works fine so I have no excuse for anything new and shiny, which is frustrating). But if I’d done so, would I announce it to the world? I think probably not, on balance - or at least I wouldn’t announce that and then tell everyone when I’m out for a meeting, or visiting family, as some people do. The connection between ‘I have something of high value in my house’ and ‘The house is now empty for a few hours’ seems not to occur to a number of individuals.

I could have missed something (please do let me know if I have) but I’m waiting for the first reports of robberies or other crimes committed by criminals using social networks in their planning. Call me a cynic, but don’t tell me you don’t agree. In the meantime I fully agree with Edelman’s call for some sort of social networking safety code - on which I will now be working for inclusion in my book. We’ve got to start monitoring what we’re doing online not only for success stories (which we like) but for undesired side effects too.

Tags: twitter, facebook, flickr, privacy, reality television, reality tv