social media – Page 5 – The Consulting Artist

Buenos Dias – A Social Holiday

We read a lot of stuff about how important it is to switch off when you go on holiday. Well this year I decided balls to that, and though my location in Southern Spain only offered 3G iPhone access which curtailed my blogging activity, I stayed online. And I had a blast – and judging by the feedback and interaction from friends on facebook, instagram and twitter – there was some useful fun being had.

I confess I did answer two or three emails – brief responses were being respectfully requested from a company who have this week become a new client. I can live with that. And the vast majority of our time away was spent sight seeing, splashing, sunning and swigging. It was very much a dip in dip out approach to the online world.

Now I’m back home I am posting the results of my 2012 holiday postcards here over the next few days and I’d also like to share a couple of fun tools I’ve been introduced to as well.

A few weeks back Laurie Ruettimann shared Flipagram with us. It’s a simple slideshow app which packages up your instagram holiday, or indeed any other kind of pics nicely. Here’s my first attempt at playing with it with some holiday pics, and I can see how you could use this tool for sharing stuff at conferences, from work projects etc.

Something else I found which I like the look of is Printstagram. This little beauty creates prints and sticker books and other cool stuff from your instagram photos. A pack of 250 stickers costs ten bucks plus twelve bucks shipping from US to UK. I’ve ordered a sticker book based on our Spanish adventures, can’t wait to see the results – I’m already thinking of lots of possible ways to develop this idea for promotions, thank yous and other stuff besides.

So can you go on holiday, remain digitally connected and have a proper break? Well for sure we had a great time and came back feeling refreshed, and we had a lot of fun with the online world in a way that perhaps you only can when you’re on holiday. Thanks to everyone who *liked* our beer of the day and other offerings :), see you for more in 2013.

Sharing and Growing – A Social Framework

So there I was, goofing around on Facebook back at the end of January, when this intriguing picture caught my eye. It’s called ‘a social framework‘ and it was being shared by sharer par excellence, William Tincup.

William used it to frame a talk he gave at The Workforce Institute about where he spends time on social, doing what, why…etc. Thereafter William stuck it on Facebook. Now I like to make my talks about the conversation – I usually just use a few photos and images on screen to provoke discussion and trigger a few thoughts in my head and I really like the way William has framed a discussion on one slide here. I was keen to learn more about what William meant by ‘promotion, 30 days’ so I got in touch and William fed back:

Doug – think of it this way… Gen 1 – it was enough to just be smart, Gen 2 – one had to be smart AND create thoughtful content, Gen 3 – assume Gen 1 and Gen 2 AND promote the heck out of stuff… so, most people create content and promote it once or twice… IMHO, that’s not enough… I suggest a promotion schedule that is more like 30 to 1… for example, create a thoughtful blog post and promote it (differently) for 30 days… rather than just once, twice or three times… or so goes the thought process…

I’ve been thinking about sharing and growing for a while. I enjoy writing this blog and I work hard at it and though still modest, the traffic volumes are picking up (hey I busted through the 4,000 visits mark last month – thanks folks). I tweet my blog posts once or twice when I write them, sometimes stick ’em on Facebook and LinkedIn too if relevant.

And I’ve played around with taking my game to where bigger audiences are. I mean – if my content is good enough, hell I don’t have to just host it here. My Waltzing Matilda collaboration with @democracyfail garnered over 10,000 hits at Human Capital League last year, compared with 800 direct hits on youtube and 134 on here. Clearly waaaaay more than I could manage by being too parochial and expecting folks to come by here all the time. So I guess I’m saying, get over yourself. If your stuff is good, find ways to get it out there as well as just leaving it on your own front doorstep.

I’m intrigued by William’s ‘3o day’ plan so I’m having a play at combining that with the ‘go to where the crowd is’ technique I’ve just illustrated. I’m using the recent report I wrote on Social Media in HR as the content for the experiment. It’s very early days, so far I’ve used this blog, and Scribd to host it. HRZone picked up on it and invited me to run it over that their place too, where it snuck into the top ten most read 😉 It’s on the CIPD Facebook page and Michael Carty will soon be providing a link from XpertHR. Thanks in advance.

So far this experiment has yielded a seven fold increase in hits to this report (comparing direct hits to here against those I can track elsewhere). I’m pretty happy with the return on investment so far.

I intend to move on and reframe the report for my customer service audience too. After all – what chance has a company of being social outside if it can’t get social inside? It will be interesting to see how this part of the experiment evolves and I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, huge thanks to William for encouraging me to look into sharing and growing anew. And to all of you I’d ask, what works for you? How do you share and grow ideas? I’d love to hear what you think.