Finbarr McCarthy

Cloud Computing & Social Media (Technologies of The Future)

Posts Tagged Branding

Does Your Business Benefit From Social Media?

Aug 8

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in OnLine Marketing | No Comments

Does Your Business Benefit From Social Media?

The unfortunate truth is that for 9 out of 10 people reading this, the answer is probably no. If you think thats bad, it gets worse, many companies are actually doing tremendous damage to their brands reputation with poorly though out attempts at using Social Media. The bad users of social media usually have one thing in common, “no buy-in”. The lack of buy-in leads to a lack of strategy and a lack of funding/resources. The typical scenario unfolds when somewhere within a company, somebody decides that social media is free and worth a shot, passes off the responsibility of implementing and maintaining a presence to someone who is unskilled in the use of social media. In the abscence of strategy and skill, most well intentioned, but unplanned social media campaigns quickly turn into a gigantic spam-fest where the perpetrators get addicted to feevourishy following people and bombarding them with one sided messages.  Remember email campaigns gone bad? It was called spam and there was a tonne of legislation brought in all over the world to combat it.

For a company to suceed in social media there has to be a little re-think on traditional marketing and PR. In the past very clever people came up with very clever messages and pushed them through the appropriate channels.  Companies who try doing this with social media will fail, pretty much 100% of the time.

Social media is different, consider it more like a place where people get together and talk, as opposed to a media channel.  if you push your message incessently without talking to people, or more importantly without listening, you will quickly look like a complete idiot and will be shunned by the community. While there are no rules per se, there is common sense.  Imagine you are a sales person and you show up at a social gathering and start screaming out loud about what you are selling today! I dont think you would do that, you would probably mingle a bit, chat with people strike up a little rapport and if the appropriate opportunity arises, tell the people you are speaking with about what you do and if welcomed to do so, pitch your product or service to them.

In a future post I will put some specific ideas together on how to most effectively use social media to promote your company, your products and services. In the meanwhile if you are not using social media to benefit your business jump in and start a conversation, if you are using social media as a one-way feed STOP AND LISTEN.

I found a bunch of very good presentations on this topic on the web, Social Media Presentations. Have a look through them and let me know what you think.

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Building Your Personal Brand Online to Help Your Career

Jul 14

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in General Rants, OnLine Marketing | 9 Comments

There is no one has any doubts about the fact that the job market is a tough place right now, jobless numbers seem to be at generational highs and depending on where you are in the world, unemployment is probably in double digits in percentage terms.  The media are having a field-day putting the shockers into us all, they are telling us stories where 500 professionals (Architects, Accountants, Lawyers, Etc) applied for a single job in McDonald’s.  Perhaps its true, I cant say for sure that its not, but it smells of old media trying to grab or retain readership with sensational headlines.  I work in the recruitment industry and yes its true that, job vacancies are down and job applicants are up, but not nearly to the extent that you would think from the media headlines.  Without underestimating the devastating impact of unemployment on an individual, you have to appreciate that the jobs market is a cyclical thing and depending on who you listen to we are either at or approaching the bottom of the cycle.  I cant predict when things will begin to improve again, but I have no doubt that an improvement is on the way.  In any case, right now, competition for jobs is tougher than it has been for a long while and to give yourself the best chance of success there are a number of things that you can do improve your odds. Specifically I am referring to “Building Your Personal Brand Online to Help Your Career”.

Here is a list of things that you can (and should) control yourself

1: Clean up your act
Many people have for the past couple of years been very open about putting all sorts of information about themselves on Social Networks. Check out any profiles you may have created and see if there is any content that you would not necessarily want a prospective employer to see.  Don’t stop with just your own profile, check out your friends profiles just in-case they may have something on their pages that could come back to haunt you.

2: Google Yourself
Simply go to Google and type in your name and see what comes up (do this in Yahoo and Bing also), dig through the results and see if you are happy with what information is available about you.  The first thing to do is to concentrate on anything that’s not portraying you in a positive light, can you access and amend the source information? If yes amend it, if not find out who can amend it - but most importantly get it taken care of.  Think I am over reacting? In a 2007 survey by Career Builder one in four managers admitted to using search engines to screen candidates, and more than half of those eliminated candidates based on what they found, I can only suspect that since then, this practice has become more mainstream. Some of the main areas of concern that hiring managers highlighted were;

  • Information about alcohol or drug use (41% of managers said this was a top concern)
  • Inappropriate photos or information posted on a candidate’s page (40%)
  • Poor communication skills (29%)
  • Bad-mouthing of former employers or fellow employees (28%)
  • Inaccurate qualifications (27%)
  • Unprofessional screen names (22%)
  • Notes showing links to criminal behavior (21%)
  • Confidential information about past employers (19%)

3: Create a LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn is a professional online network and in my view it is essential to create and maintain an up to date profile there.  LinkedIn is also a very good place to build and maintain a your network of past and current contacts and it can really help you to keep in touch with people you may otherwise loose contact with.  Apart from that LinkedIn enables you to create an online profile which outlines your current and past employment details, your professional affiliations and achievements and there is also a feature which allows people to recommend (reference) you.  Make sure to add in an appropriate amount of keywords under which prospective employers might search.

4: Participate
Its not good enough to just create good profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook, if you dont participate in discussions, groups etc there is a very high chance that you will never get any attention.  If you have specific professional skills or have a passion on a specific topic there is a very good chance that there is a group on LinkedIn for like minded people, if so join the group, if there is no such group consider creating a group and search out and invite like minded people to join.

5: Turn OnLine Contacts into OffLine Contacts
Consider attending events organised by your groups and contacts on LinkedIn and Facebook, Online connections are a good starting point but it can be very helpful to get out and actually meet some of the connections you have made.  There are several examples of this from attending Open Coffee sessions to seminars on your area of interest.

6: Blog or Create a Website
This might not be for everyone but creating your own blog or even a simple website can be a very enjoyable and beneficial project.  In particular if you are extremely passionate about a specific topic it is an extremely enjoyable pursuit, be warned though, if you are only vaugely interested in what you are writing about it will quickly become apparent to your readers and there is also a very high chance that you will give up yourself.  I am extremely passionate about Cloud Computing and the Internet and get great pleasure in sharing my thought with others on the subject.

In conclusion, even if you are not in the job market right now it is still worth your while considering the points above.  Because of the way data is stored and propogated on the internet, it can take anywhere from days to months to get any unwanted information to drop out of the search engine indexes (even after the source information has been deleted / amended) and the same amount of time to get your desired professional information appearing where and when you want it.  The job market will bounce back and getting control of your own personal brand now will most certainly pay dividends in the long term.

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Zombie Thinking In The Digital Age

Jun 7

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in OnLine Marketing | 1 Comment

Zombie thinking is mindlessly doing what has always been done while ignoring diminishing returns.  It might seem like an odd opener but it seems to be happening alot lately.  Consider General Motors, for many decades the ultimate blue-chip company ground into bankruptcy because of zombie thinking.  There are any number of explanations for GM’s fate, but the main reason seems to stem from the fact that they didn’t listen to their customers and continued to produce products that they didn’t want.

On a smaller scale many companies suffer from a similar fate with their online efforts.  The difficulty starts out with the assumption that online marketing is the same as traditional marketing.  This view was OK with Web 1.0, but with the phenomenal adoption of Web 2.0 all the rules have changed.

It’s difficult to define the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in a single sentence - One simple explanation is Web 1.0 was a monologue and Web 2.0 is a dialogue.  Traditionally, brand owners created, distributed and controlled the message, it was very much a one-way feed.  Nowadays the situation is very different, consumers now have a real voice, both individually and collectively.

Yes you can try to get hip by creating a company blog, a facebook page and even a twitter account.  You can pull out your brand guidelines book and customise these pages with your company colours and fonts, but is anyone actually looking?

“People communicate with people on Social Media, not with companies”


So you decide to let some of your employees start communicating with your customers via blogs, twitter and facebook, you pull out your brand guidelines book, but you can’t find the section that deals with this, sounds familiar?

The truth is that the majority of companies have not yet gotten around to deciding how to deal with this opportunity, some have taken the step of blocking it because they don’t understand it (this happened many times before - remember companies blocking internet access and email because it was only a distraction).

The road to success with Web 2.0 is a challenging one.  If you accept the basic principle of putting your people out in front of your brand you will have many difficult questions to address.

In addition to the areas you will already have covered such as, tone of voice, phrases to own, tense etc, you will now also need to provide guidelines on grammar, personal exposure (what you can reveal about yourself), politics, religion, interests, passions, etc.  Additionally, you need to start a campaign to monitor mentions of your company on the wire and decide whether or not your policy is to respond to every post, how to deal with criticism and even what to do with positive mentions and compliments.

There is also the discomforting fact that what your employees write doesn’t get sanitised by your PR and Legal departments, this actually gets at the essence of what Web 2.0 is about, if every statement were to be sanitised through the corporate mill there may be no message left at the end of it and after all your customers are looking for human interaction not polished corporate spiel accompanied by a ten page legal disclaimer.

One company who has stepped up to this challenge particularly well is Microsoft, for many years Microsoft was the company that everyone loved to hate, over the past couple of years Microsoft has used the power of its own people to put a personal face to the company and re-vitalise the brand in the eyes of its customers.  They refer to each of their employees as “Brand Ambassadors” and give them the responsibility to represent the Microsoft brand to the world in a very personal way.  For one, I think they have achieved remarkable success.

Here are a couple of tips to guide your efforts;

  • Dont ignore Web 2.0, its not going away anytime soon
  • Do participate in conversations but don’t try to dominate
  • Do use Buzz Monitoring Tools
  • Do update your brand guidelines to set some ground-rules for your employees engaging with customers on-line
  • Dont be afraid of making the odd mistake, afterall we are all human
  • Do let people have a little fun with this

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Charles Darwin

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Monitoring Your Brand OnLine

May 31

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in OnLine Marketing | 8 Comments

Update 13th October 2009 check out - http://tattlerapp.com/download

If you are serious about monitoring your brand these days you will no doubt be aware of the vast amount of information propagating on the web every minute of every day.  Consider all the messages that fly by on Twitter, posts on Facebook, My Space etc.  Now add in all the blogs, photo sharing and video sharing and you feel your head spin.

It seems like an impossible task right? ….

Wrong.

There is a fantastic solution that right out of the box called Buzz Monitor that will monitor Alexa, Ask/Bloglines, Blip TV, BlogPulse, Compete, Daily Motion, Delicious, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Google News Search, Google Video, IceRocket, Technorati, Topix, Truveo, Twitter, Youtube…..   plus many more  for your brand name on an ongoing basis.

Buzz monitor downloads the pages that mention your brand to its own database and runs the content through the excellent Open Calais service to semantically tag the entire content contextually.

At the front end you get a very simple interface which gives you tag clouds, sources of mentions as well as trends and timelines and other well laid out and useful information to stay informed about how your brand is doing on-line.  This is very useful in the Web 2.0 world as it will enable brand conscious businesses to interact immediately with a global audience and respond appropriately to any good or bad feedback/ discussions involving their brand.

Buzz Monitor is a serious piece of work based on a Drupal platform, it is integrated with services from some of the most successful and innovative companies on the web including Thomson Reuters (Open Calais), Amazon (Alexa), Google (Youtube, Video, News, Blogs), Compete, Yahoo / Flickr, Technorati, Twitter and Delicious to mention a few.

You are probably expecting a hefty price tag?  The good news is, it is absolutely free.  It is all based on open source software.  The software itself is pretty easy to setup, particularly if you have any Drupal experience.

The download was available on www.opensourceopenminds.com but is currently displaying a message to check back in July.  I do have a copy of the Drupal install profile if this is something of interest to you.  (If you want to download BuzzMonitor drop me a line or I can also hook you up with a Drupal consultant if you want someone to set this up for you).

So.  If you are serious about your on-line brand identity, or you want to monitor your brand on-line Buzz Monitor is something you definitely want.

As an additional thought! If anyone has a bunch of clients who would benefit from “On-Line Brand Monitoring” as a service there may be a very interesting business opportunity, I can take care of the setup and hosting if you have some clients who would use this……..

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