It wasn’t that long ago that you had to be famous to be in the media. For years now the rich and famous have had to watch everything they do in public (and often private) for fear that their every move is being monitored and documented. One wrong step and their lives could be turned upside-down by the media.

Now thanks to Social Media it’s not just celebrities that are always in the media. Thanks to the Internet and our Social Media tools we can all be journalists and photographers, and just as the professionals document every aspect of celebrities lives, we’re using the likes of Facebook and Flickr to  document every aspect of our own lives and the lives of our friends.

Issues that in past might have only effected those in the media spotlight now effect anyone who participates voluntarily or perhaps involuntary in social media.

But the life of a celebrity isn’t all bad, and fortunately it’s not just the negative aspects of celebrity we now all have access to. The Internet now provides opportunities and services that once upon a time would have been restricted to the rich and famous.

Here’s the top ten reasons (good and bad) why we now all live the life of a celebrity:

1. You might wake up the morning after to find photos of your druken antics available for the world to see

2. The world knows your entire relationship past and present, with break-ups being major news (feed) material

3. Outspoken outbursts can seriously effect your career, one misinformed comment (or status update) can cost you your job

4. People who you don’t even know wish you happy birthday

5. Successful manipulation of of the media is essential to getting on with your life, be that court injunctions or facebook privacy settings

6. You can have hundreds on fake friends

7. You can get anything you want at the press of a button, be that a Butler or ice for your drink

8. You can wear trainers with your name on them

9. However crazy you become there will always be someone who will listen to you

10. People will use your image and reputation for their own benefit

Before I visited China I was aware of the high level of Internet censorship, or as many call it the great firewall of China. However, due to mixed reports and constant change I was unsure exactly what the Chinese web browsing experience would bring. As it turned out not all of my preconceptions turned out to be true.

I found that it’s our most popular social media tools that you will have most trouble accessing. Facebook, Twitter, and various popular blogging sites (no Trendplanner!) appear to have never existed, entering the urls will provide you with the same response as if you had simply hit the keys at random. Another constant block (while I was in the country) that I found a little surprising due to extensive promotion of Google in the country was the Google owned youtube. After entering the url you were often given hope by the sight of the familiar red and white logo, but this hope soon faded as it began to look like you were using a browser of yesteryear that was in no position to handle graphics or video.

Due to reports I heard around the time of the Olympics I had expected to find the BBC and Wikipedia blocked. However, the BBC was available for the majority of my stay, as were other western news sources such as CNN, and the  majority of US and UK newspaper sites. Perhaps even more of a surprise was to have access to Wikipedia, including articles on the site that mentioned the controversial events of Tianeman square. However, I soon found that Wikipedia was not free from the constraints of censorship. I was unable to access various articles including an article on Internet censorship in China, and though perhaps coincidently after trying to do so I was unable to access any Wikipedia articles at all for several hours that followed.

It is possible to access sites behind the firewall, but not always with ease. Twitter and facebook can sometimes by accessed via third party sites, but as soon these are spotted these sites get blocked. Hootsuite worked the day I arrived but didn’t the next, in the end the only site that hadn’t been blocked was SocialWhale (thanks guys). The best way to get access is to use a VPN (virtual private network), however once you’re behind the firewall the best sites to download the software have been blocked, and even when you have the software you will often struggle to again access. The best free service I found was Ultra VPN which gave me access (some of the time) to a French ip address.

Having some of my most used sites blocked was a real inconvenience to me, but many Chinese do not see a problem. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and wordpress do not offer unique services, Chinese users have access to many social networking, and video sharing sites, many of which probably offer a better service than the aforementioned sites. What’s more in a society where all forms of media are under strict censorship rules, most people (though I found plenty that didn’t) seem comfortable or at least expectant of Internet restrictions.

It appears that the Chinese government is well aware that the Internet is vital to the continuation of the country’s rapid economic growth. They don’t want to restrict activity that could benefit the country, but at the same time they don’t want such activity to threaten their position of power. Therefore they ensure that Internet users have access to services such as social networking and video sites, but they ensure that these are sites and site owners the government considers ‘suitable’.

Chances are there are also various financial motives behind the blocking, there is a lot more benefit to China to see a Chinese social network flourish in China than the American owned service such as Facebook.

So the firewall can bring benefits to China, but issues of personal freedom aside, censorship could restrict real progress within the digital space for China. Chinese users have access to most forms of social media tools, but they might be missing out on specific services to use or perhaps integrate with their own (no facebook connect in China). Restrictions hamper innovation, and time will tell if the firewall restricts China’s progress in the digital world.

So here’s the ten most popular twitter posts I sent out last month.

1. Social media in China – It’s a whole new world – http://ow.ly/CJI8

2. The Ultimate List of Niche Social Networks – http://ow.ly/tjB0

3. Good tool. YouTube – Insights for audience. http://ow.ly/CJPM

4. Sony Japan turns ads to jeans – http://ow.ly/BQLg

5. Six Social Media Trends For 2010 – http://ow.ly/z60C

6. Social Media Accounts for 18% of Information Search Market – http://ow.ly/DDh2

7. It’s a map… of the future. Crazy but good. http://ow.ly/z5Zn

8. Good insight – 10 Principals for Engaging Teens/20 somethings. http://ow.ly/pq90

9. Scary stuff! Your Company May Own Your Tweets, Pokes, and YouTube Videos – http://ow.ly/zJhG

10. The Next Mobile Leap Forward: Fold-out Screens and Apps That Anticipate Our Needs – http://ow.ly/DDii

1. Good insight – 10 Principals for Engaging Teens/20 somethings. http://ow.ly/pq90

2. The Ultimate List of Niche Social Networks – http://ow.ly/tjB0

3. Losing To The Social Web: Visualized – http://ow.ly/t6Vg

4. GoodMorning! Twitter visualisation. http://ow.ly/vk9S

5. What brands can learn from Cheryl Cole – http://ow.ly/wclW

6. How 20 popular websites looked when they launched – http://ow.ly/nRUg

7. A great way to see Twitter trends: Trendsmap – Real-time local Twitter trends http://ow.ly/qrZq

8. Outdoor Augmented Reality without the hassle (but still fun!) – http://ow.ly/ub6b

9. Apple finally gets on Twitter – http://ow.ly/vsEx

10. Why Facebook could be the next big news publisher (if they want to be) http://ow.ly/tVjU

There’s a lot of hype around right now about the mobile service called foursquare. For those that don’t know foursquare is a location based social networking mobile application. The first element of Foursquare is a friend locator; it allows users to share and see the location of their friends that are also using the service (similar to Google Latitude), users can share their location (check in) by sending a text, or by logging into the application on a location aware handset such as the iPhone. The second element of foursquare is a city guide; it lets users rate and review places in their city, so others can use the application to help them explore their city. The third element to foursquare is a game; users are rewarded points for checking in outside of regular working hours, with more points gained when check ins are in different locations.

Foursquare is currently available in 20 cities in the US and Amsterdam, it is getting a lot of attention and lots of people are using it. Foursquare users love being able to see where their friends are, and learn more about their city, but perhaps surprisingly they are just as passionate about the third gaming element of the service. What might appear at first as a slightly trivial function that will get overlooked by the majority of users appears to be extremely popular and is likely to be the function that is driving it’s success. The success of social media services is entirely dependent on people using service and doing so regularity, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t be much fun if no-one else was using them. What the game function of Foursquare has done is given people an incentive to make regular use of the service, it provides a competitive element, and a reliable measure of success. Foursquare points cannot actually be converted into any real currency, but the same human desire for respect and status that largely drives our desire for money (and with what it can buy) drives our desire to gain status points that money can’t buy.

Foursquare is not the only example of how ‘worthless’ points monetary speaking can drive participation. Microsoft Xbox users gain points for achievements they make across all their xbox activity, these points are then displayed as part of the players online profile. These points are essentially worthless, but it doesn’t stop users playing and buying games to earn more points, and trying to out do the people they know. Furthermore, if you look closely other less obvious examples exist. Take Facebook and Twitter, although neither explicitly has a game element both have been driven by competitive elements that have a reliable measure of success. A major drive for many Twitter users is to gain a large following, and many Facebook users are driven by the desire the have lots of ‘friends’ or upload as many pictures of themselves as possible.

Social media is largely driven by human competitiveness and desire for status, if people want to make a game out of social media make sure there is a game to be played, and as Foursquare and Xbox have taught us it doesn’t always hurt to tell them they’re playing.

Image: Roomjosh

Brands are finally starting to enter social media channels, and those that are yet to do so will have to in very near future. Social media provides some very real challenges for brands, but with these challenges comes some amazing opportunities.

It’s a complex game that requires some serious attention, skill and knowledge. Not unlike a game of Poker (yes Poker!)…

So what can Poker teach us about successful use of Social Media?

If you’ve never played before it’s a good idea to spend some time observing before you get involved. At the early stages of using social media, the best thing to do is simply observe. For one this process can aid learning about the various environments, on the other hand it can provide vital information. People are talking about your brand and you need to know what they’re saying. Find out what people think about your latest campaign or product, and take the feedback on-board. You can go to great lengths and at great cost to get feedback from customers, be sure to make use of the feedback that’s right at your fingertips.

When you start playing, you don’t play in one big high risk game, you go for lots of smaller low risk games where it doesn’t matter if you lose. You can’t just enter a social media environment and assume that as long as you spend the money and time you will be successful. You test the water with small campaigns or better still get involved at a level not representing the brand, set up twitter accounts, youtube pages, blog, find out what works and what doesn’t. It’s vital that you’re using these tools day in and day out if your going to be able to take things to the next level.

At the end of the day it’s always a gamble, but you often your chances of success will be higher than others. These days everyone wants to know the ROI, they want a guaranteed return on their investment. Unfortunately you can never guarantee success but you can use knowledge of what has worked and not worked in the past to inform your choices. It’s vital to keep track of other social media activity to help build this knowledge.

Timing is key. What will work within social media is completely context dependent. What might have worked a few months ago might not work this month, the right environment last week might not be the right environment this week, just because it worked yesterday doesn’t mean it’s going to work today.

Knowledge of etiquette is essential. If you don’t observe the un-written rules people won’t want to play with you, and you can’t play if you’ve got no-one to play with. There’s plenty of rules to follow set by social media sites such as copy-write rules on youtube and promotion rules on facebook. But just as important are the many unwritten rules which you can only discover by getting involved and actually using the tools. For example, Habitat learnt that you could use hash tags on twitter improve visibility in twitter search, but they didn’t realise the kind of backlash they would receive for mis-using these tags. As well as negative consequences not knowing the unwritten rules can also result in missed opportunity. For example, it’s generally considered unacceptable to communicate with customers via facebook, however the same cannot necessarily be said for some contexts within Twitter (in the case of an @reply). Assuming all reply options are out of bounds could result in a missed opportunity to communicate with your audience.

You have no control over the cards you get dealt and the decisions other players make, only the decisions you make. As much as you might wish you could control peoples behaviour and reactions to your decisions you have to accept that you can’t. Instead you need to be prepared to every reaction and learn how to respond when things don’t go the way you planned. For example when Pepsi were in hot water earlier this year over a potentially offensive ad they got straight on twitter to explain and apologise directly to those involved.

If you don’t play a hand at some point you’re not going to win. This game is happening, it’s going on right now, nobody is going to force you to get involved but if you don’t you will miss out.

You might get lucky once, but if you don’t know what your doing you’ll soon get found out. It’s not that common but sometimes you can just get lucky, the viral nature of the Internet means that content can almost come from anywhere. But hype dies even quicker than builds on the Internet, and unless you harness the power of any activity you won’t be seeing that success continue.

However…

It’s not all the same. Don’t think you can bluff your way through social media, bluffing can win you a game of poker, but it will only get you so far in social media. Transparency is essential, so lets see those cards.

Image: Kimberlyfaye

Social Media: Do you need to reinvent the wheel?

It’s claimed that in Mesopotamia (part of modern day Iraq) 3500BC one of the most important tools ever was invented. That tool was the wheel, however the original use of the wheel is unlikely to be the use that most people would automatically associate it with in the current day. In 3500BC the wheel was used in pottery as what we would now call the ‘potters wheel’, and it was not until 3200BC that the wheel was used for transportation (contrary to evidence from the Flintstones…). This is a clear demonstration of how the use of a tool is not necessarily defined by its intended or original use, all that really matters is if the tool can be used to achieve specific goals.

Jump forward 5000 or so years and we can see how the same principles of a tool can be applied to modern day Social Media. The first thing to make clear is that Social Media is a tool, it is something that can (and in the case of many brands should) be used to help you achieve specific goals.

Twitter was positioned (and still is on the homepage) as a tool for people to let friends, family, and co-workers know what they’re doing. Of course people do use the service for this use, but many others have found many other ways to make use of twitter. For example many people are using the service to exchange information with people they’ve never met, and using the information provided by the service as a real time search of almost any subject. It’s not important that these uses were not the intended use of the tool, all that matters is that the tool is helping people achieve their desired objectives (what ever these might be).

Youtube was originally set up with the goal to allow ordinary computer users the chance to post their video content online. There is no disputing it has been successful in this aim, however, if you look to the most watched on youtube you’ll see that this is not the only way people are using the tool. In fact the majority of most watched videos on youtube are actually music videos, many of these have not been posted by ‘ordinary computer users’ but by large corporations, furthermore, many users are not actually watching these videos but simply using youtube as a music player. Once again the original use of the tool remains (as with the wheel and twitter) but the tool has really shown it’s true potential when it has been used in ways that were not necessarily intended.

So as with the wheel there is no correct way to use Social Media tools, the key is to find how the tool can work best for you or your brand, and in some instances this might even require discovering another way in which the tool can be used. Potters used the wheel in a very different way to cart vendors, just as groups of friends use twitter differently to brands, and how budding film makers use youtube differently to record companies. But even though there is such variation in the use of the individual tools no one group can claim to be using the tool in a manner better than the other, success is completely context relevant.

The most successful tools will have many uses and appeal to many different people, but even the most successful tools can’t be used by everyone. If there is no way the tool can be used to achieve your objectives then it’s not the right tool for you, you’ll need to find a different tool or tools to achieve your objectives. So therefore just because brand A is using a social media tool with great success does not mean brand B can use the same tool in the same manner to achieve similar success. Brand B needs to find a way to make the tool work for their specific goals or maybe even look to different tools altogether to which their goals are better suited.

Image: Cartype

The first video in this post is an ad for Freesat (UK TV service), the second video is from youtube called ‘Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years’. The second has been viewed over 12 million times and was posted over 2 years before the freesat ad. Notice any similarities??

Clearly the Freesat ad has taken ideas from the youtube video, and this is certainly not the first time this has happened. You’ll find a lot of ads on TV that have taken ideas from youtube content (try the latest aero ad). Furthermore, this practice is not restricted to video, you’ll see it in all communication channels. For example new Skittles social media portal site clearly took ideas from the agency Modernista! who previously used the idea for their agency website.

On the surface of it, it appears we have a new problem. But the truth of the matter is that it’s nothing new, and it’s anything but a problem.

So the freesat ad took an idea from a youtube video, the skittles site took an idea from Modernista! But is anyone actually losing out? Most people don’t post videos to youtube for financial reward, they do it to share their ideas, to gain views, and respect. What better compliment could your video be paid than having the idea used by a major brand? On the other hand what better compliment could a digital agency get than having their idea used by a rival agency for a major brand. I imagine hits to their site shot up as a result of all the skittles site talk.

People have been taking ideas since the the beginning of time, Shakespeare found most of his ideas from other plays, do you think Ford came up with the concept of the wheel? But now thanks to the Internet the real influencers can be found, even if people do not pay direct compliments to their influences someone else will, what’s more the evidence will be time stamped on the Internet for all to see. The point to remember is that the taking of others ideas is nothing new, it’s just become far more visible.

We need to appreciate that all great ideas will be influenced by other ideas, what’s more it’s impossible for any idea not to be influenced by the context within which it’s created. For example, any idea for a web based idea will be largely defined by the context and concept of the Internet. Furthermore, when we appreciate broader factors of context such as the culture, society, and even scientific paradigm (See Hume) in which an idea is created it becomes truly apparent just how unoriginal any idea really is.

So next time you think you’ve seen a blatant rip off, appreciate the compliment this is to the ‘original’ idea, appreciate how the idea has been used, and appreciate that nothing is original anyway.

In 1992 Robert Dunbar proposed that the number of meaningful social connections we can successfully maintain is 148. Since then a lot has changed and many would argue that our new digital tools enable us to maintain more relationships than ever before. While on the other hand many would maintain that ‘Dunbar’s number’ is still valid, and although our facebook and twitter profiles might suggest otherwise  it is in fact impossible nor desirable to manage over 148 social connections

There are various points of view about this issue formed by some excellent minds, but why waste your time with these when you can listen to a UK X-factor reject singing about the issue?!

Eoghan Quigg – 28000 friends

“how does it feel to be alone,with so many friends that you don’t know?does your snow white skin ever see the sunshine?
you and your 28,000 friends
(im talkin bout)youtube,facebook,myspace,im”

Have you ever seen such a painfully awful attempt at being modern, relevant, and appealing to the youth of today?

1. It lets brands join the conversation about their brand

2. If you don’t someone else will!

Source: Thisisanad

People like user reviews and research proves they can be very influential in the decision making process. Brands are often worried about negative reviews so don’t allow them on their site, but they need to understand that that’s not going to make the bad reviews go away, they will just be found somewhere else. Why not provide the service on the brand site, in an area you will have some (not a lot) of control over, and where you can easily join in the conversation and talk directly to your customers?

Other brands might use the excuse that their product isn’t suitable for reviews and that people won’t be intersted in reviewing or reading reviews of their product. A quick look on the around the net shows you this is far from true, I managed to find a number of reviews for all sorts of products including monster munch (many flavours!).

Innocent have always been switched on when it comes to digital marketing, and they’ve now introduced user ratings of their products on their main site. Innocent understand the value of the medium, not so long ago they used the channel to defend/explain their decision to allow McDonald’s to stock their smoothies, they understand that there’s no hiding any more so you might as well get out there and make the most of it.

Innocent