Keith Childs - Lifestream

Communicator Creating Change. Starting with myself.

"connectedness" and "engagement" should never be confused

Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image, discusses Human Interconnectedness in an interview by Stewart Quealy. He makes the point that the number of followers is no measure of engagement.

S.Q.: Speaking of industry buzzwords, you warn readers rather sternly that "connectedness" and "engagement" should never be confused. Care to elaborate?

M.J.: A lot of people feel they have a right to shill, promote, and push their wares just because they are "connected." In a day and age where following, friending, or subscribing to anyone about anything is nothing more than a simple click away, there needs to be some time, effort, and thought put against the idea that being connected is basic and primal, but actually creating any level of engagement with an audience, community, or whatever you want to call whomever has agreed to follow or friend you, is a whole other ballgame. People make the assumption that just because they're following you, they're engaged with you...and that's a misnomer. Think about Twitter: you may have 12,000 followers but if you're posting and the majority of your followers happen to not be connected on Twitter at that specific moment in time, your real engagement level with that community is probably a very small percentage of the actual whole number. People like to say they have X amount of friends and X amount of followers, but how many of those friends and followers are really engaged with them? Those are two totally different worlds as far as I can see.

via clickz.com

 Read the full interview here.

Twitter May Be Prepping Auto-Translate Option - Reviews by PC Magazine

Twitter appears to be preparing to roll out a feature that would automatically translate posts into your preferred native language, according to a Twitter page I saw today.

Last October, Twitter's Biz Stone authored a blog post that indicated that Twitter would soon be arriving languages beyond Twitter's native English and Japanese, including French, Italian, German, and Spanish. But that post, I believe, was designed to announce translations to the Web site (including words like "following,") rather than translating the posts themselves.

The results page (from one of Wednesday's trending topics, "Bloodbuzz Ohio") allows a user to filter a tweet by language, from Arabic to Icelandic to Thai. But just above that appeared a clickable option to translate the tweets on the page to my preferred language, English.

That may be because one of the tweets that appeared on the page was posted in Dutch. Unfortunately, clicking the "Translate" link didn't work this morning, but by this afternoon it had, with the translation supplied by Google, as you can see in the graphic below. There was also an option to expand the short link to the full URL, without actually being forced to click through.

Twitter Auto-Translate Page 2

There are several Greasemonkey scripts that perform auto-translation of Twitter tweets, but this is the first time I've seen a native Twitter auto-translation function. If Twitter begins to overhaul its search results with the auto-translation, URL-expansion, and the new popularity priorities, the Twitter experience may radically changed over the next few months.

Originally posted to AppScout.
via pcmag.com

Social media marketing case studies


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I never really liked the association of the words marketing and social. I suppose it's because I saw- and continue to see- misguided attempts to approach social with the same mindset used for other marketing channels.  Wikipedia defines Marketing "...as the process by which companies determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It is an integrated process through which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return."

The problem for me then is not marketing. It's bad marketing. Creating value... and building strong relationships is what social is all about. And I don't like the word media either. The very use of the word already lumps it together with advertising, POS, direct mail and the interruption style of sending out messages. Why is a community media? Too late. The labels are stuck.

I enjoyed reading Social Media Marketing at the largest brands in the world. A free report from Swix.You can download the pdf here. Some really good case histories where companies have thought carefully about their audience, what they want and how they can add value to that community. I'm feeling happier about the association of the words marketing and social. But I still wonder. Why do we see so many examples of bad marketing?

The changing role of communicators

Last week I was a reporter. Or, more accurately, I had to think like a reporter. I was working during the press days of the Geneva motor show- arguably the most important motor show in Europe as it's an annual event, unlike the Paris and Frankfurt shows that are every two years.

In addition to the usual media activities of press conferences, interviews, press kits and online resources we launched a dual-language twitter channel (@opelblog) and a posterous blog. The focus of the blog is a behind the scenes look at events and activities. Instead of repurposing press material I was part of team creating content. Writing text. Taking pictures. Making videos. And it made me think about the changing role of communicators.

We were thinking like reporters. What is going to make an interesting story? Will this appeal to our audience? And we were thinking like editors. Making sure we were scheduling our posts and not having long gaps of silence. We had to think about the headlines of our posts which would be tweeted in 140 characters. As communicators we assumed the role of reporter, film maker, photographer, editor and publisher. Gone were the multi-approval steps. The responsibility was in our hands. Create, publish- and hope you don't make any mistakes.

On the publication side we were multi-tasking. We were switching between Tweetdeck, our YouTube and flickr pages. We were checking our media sites. We were responding to comments, uploading videos, images, writing posts and knowing the second you hit publish it's out there. Too late to change your mind. While all this is going on you're thinking about the next “story”. Just an example: with a Kodak ZI6 point-and-shoot video camera I did a short interview with Gherardo Corsini who drove the Opel Ampera on its first long distance test drive from Rüsselsheim in Germany to Geneva. 

Just a few days before two colleagues of mine accompanied him on the 550 km drive, live blogging the event on opel.posterous.com. As communicators this is how our role is changing. Not that we abandon the traditional roles we have- counselor, advisor, strategic planner, writer, project manager and so on. We have additional roles- and maybe ones we are having to learn. Some will take to it more easily than others. I think it's an exciting change.