Playing hard to get

In today’s world, it’s fairly rare for us to miss a call, a text or a notification. We’re either at our desks (with our iPhones by our side) or eating (with our iPhones by our side) or on the late bus home (um, I think someone just stole my iPhone).

So, the likelihood of not being able to receive and respond to a message right away is getting slimmer and slimmer. Nevertheless certain codes of conduct prevail. Despite our ever increasing links to technology, we remain humans at heart. We still want to manage perception, look cool and be seen to be doing things “the right way”.

With this in mind, I’ve put together a little list of recommended response times for our favourite platforms.

Emails: Right away. Emailing is the new instant messaging. It shows that you are across multiple devices and totally on it. Always cc people, it doesn’t only keep you in the loop: you are the loop. The loop is nothing without you.

LinkedIn invitations: 3 to 4 days. Ideally at stupid o’clock on an early weeknight. This suggests that you are 24/7, going hard, taking names and killing it. ‘I Don’t Get Jet Lag’ is your middle name.

DMs: 20 mins. This says you are busy but accessible, in demand but in control, bright yet breezy. Leave it any longer and you might as well never reply. The moment has passed. Twitter - and you - have moved on. Get over it.

Instant Messages: 4-5 hours. See ‘Emails’. No one has time for IM-ing anymore. It’s not 2003 ffs. 

Facebook friend requests: Never. If you’re not already friends on Facebook, then it’s just another person in your life who doesn’t use Twitter.

Twitter follows: Follow back instantly. Within two hours you should have established GIF-based in-jokes, sent inappropriate DM’s and pretty much nailed down that #ff shout out.

Instagram comments: If it’s food related, 3 hours. Everything else, right away. Stay in the feed, yo.

Text Messages: Right away. If they’ve got your phone number, you probably know them in “real” life. It’s probably your Mum.

Actual face-to-face meetings: Plan months in advance, set a Google Calendar reminder to cancel twenty minutes before. Always keep ‘em wanting more.

Foursquare/ Find My Friends requests: Alert the police. Things just got weird.

Preference Setting (Part 1)

About a year ago I wrote a post entitled “20 Reasons Not to Date a Digital Strategist”. It was just a bit of fun, but since April that entry has had almost 10,000 views and travelled from the UK to North America, Canada, Australia and most of Western Europe. Clearly I was not alone in my exasperation - and amusement - at the undefined rules of engagement for social media when it came to real life relationships.  And, while corporations busily debate the financial value of a “like”, it seems regular people everywhere are trying to figure out its emotional value.

Claiming expertise in the management of connections and engagement online is a lucrative career choice these days - ensuring brands maintain consistent, rewarding relationships with their customers. Yet, there exist no guidelines (official or otherwise) for managing personal relationships across so many platforms. Recently Mashable reported that 1 in 10 people playing the Scrabble-esque word game Words with Friends has directly led to a "hook up". While Facebook is currently cited in one third of all UK divorces. For perhaps the first time in human history branded platforms - and the behaviour they nurture, encourage and, ultimately, manipulate for their own commercial ends - are affecting our interpersonal relationships. Ahead of Facebook's IPO, Zuckerberg even went so far as to admit wanting to actively "rewire" people and they way they form connections!


Social media brands nurture a behaviour that revolves around constant self-refinement. Their business models rely on our belief that we are only as interesting as our last post, or as popular as the number of followers we have. So much so that it's easy to get caught up in the expectation to continuously like, follow, friend, favourite, re-pin, and re-tweet. Russell M Davies said recently that social media is “networking for shy people”. Safely adhering to the rules of a predetermined user experience, it's easy just to pick out and present our best sides, our wittiest comments and our coolest links. But Facebook, Twitter and the like are all engines by which to curate ourselves, and it is these curated selves - not our real selves - with which we are now forming new, online relationships.

But what happens to the online, curated self in the real world, when the shy people have to meet up offline? Coping with the reconciliation of avatar to human being becomes a daunting, even stressful, prospect. Are we ever going to be as interesting, glamorous or funny? What happens if the connection formed online disappears offline? Suddenly, the potential for traversing an emotional minefield grows vast. Gone are the days when you could yank your phone line out the wall - 80’s movie style - and cry into your tie-dye leggings til you felt better. Now - connected across multiple platforms - you’re on the Internet, they’re on the Internet and, without really wanting to, you know each other’s every thought and move. The complex machine learning and recommendation engines behind Facebook and Google were designed for the group hug of the open web, not the late-night Internet-loitering individual.

So, I guess that number 21 on the list of reasons not to date a digital strategist is that we're going to over think this situation. The gender divide, the 'Digital Native' generation, and taking existing, real world relationships online are all part of it, and aspects which call for separate consideration. As brands and technological innovation impact on how we build interpersonal relationships, the opportunity for us to define the rules of engagement becomes greater yet harder. Without taking the backwards step of disconnecting altogether, we must learn to live our real lives whilst simultaneously plugged into an online world.

Photos via Ida Rhoda, Howard Grey, Henri Lartigue

The Power of Influence -or- What It Really Means To Get A Tweet From Ashton

In a recent article from the New York Times, Joe Fernandez CEO and co-founder of Klout said, “For the first time, we’re all on an even playing field... it’s not just how much money you have or what you look like. It’s what you say and how you say it.” And, for about 24 hours last week, I watched astounded as this came to life in front of me.

My last post reviewed A+ - the Twitter client from Ashton Kutcher and UberMedia. Just as the West Coast turned in for the night, and I jumped on the 67 bus into work, Ashton tweeted his thanks and appreciation for my review. My fellow bus passengers were totally freaked out by my screams of excitement. By the time I arrived at my desk, my blog had received 3,000 hits. At close of play on 22nd June the post had reached an amazing 8,000 views - up 7,900 on my usual daily visitors.



Now, let's calm down and do the math. Ashton has 7,075,316 followers on Twitter. Of those followers, about 0.1% clicked through to my blog. Amongst the 8,000 who read the post, 30 then followed me on Twitter. That's a fair downward slide in engagement - a key indicator of influence. So I got to wondering, just how influential is Ashton and about what, because despite being a key investor and consultant in tech, it seems his audience aren't a geeky lot - they aren't interested in blog posts about desktop apps. And, conversely, the key tech influencers don't appear to view Ashton as a hot source on tech news. In one Silicon Valley workshop I ran earlier this year, I was surprised when the client insisted on putting Ashton on the "We are not" board.



Ultimately, Ashton (and his wife Demi Moore) are known globally for their celebrity. For most of the world, Ashton is the dude from "Dude, Where's My Car" and Punk'd. He has fans - 7 million of whom follow him on Twitter. And, when it comes to his causes and charities, those followers are something powerful to leverage into action. Equally, for the execs behind Two and a Half Men, Ashton has both the star quality and dedicated following to drown out Sheen's incoherent rantings come the new season.



Having witnessed the power of "God-like" influence first-hand, I must agree with the NYT piece, "focus your digital presence on one or two areas of interest. Don’t be a generalist". Ashton's celebrity following prevents him from being a leading influencer in the very area of interest he is attempting to focus on, he is a victim of his own digital presence. All praise to him for starting Katalyst, his own digital media company, but if I were Ashton and really wanted to cultivate influence in tech? I'd start a side stream (@AKTech ??), get down and geeky, and aim to be the first person to get 1 million tech tweeters to take you off the "We are not board" and get on board with Ashton the media mogul.

Appiquette

A code of behavior that delineates expectations for social networking behavior according to contemporary conventional norms within a society, tweet-up, or Facebook group. The British word Appiquette, literally made up by Camilla in 2011.

Most of us are now accustomed to the modern table setting - knife, fork, phone (at home) or notepad, pen, laptop, phone (at work). The occasional glance at incoming emails, goes barely noticed by present company. But how are we managing the new wave in location-based social networking? At what point and with whom can one politely check-in on Foursquare, or ping out a Hashable? It's a modern conundrum.

I've noticed three distinct groups emerging.

The Social Show-Offs - The meeting itself will have been organised across so many different platforms, they both turn up late, made even later by the fact that they are texting and DM-ing each other as they approach. The restaurant will have been selected through Yelp, the location Google-mapped, photos from Foodspotting screen-grabbed and the event iCal-ed, and tweeted ad infinitum. Once actual IRL life contact has been made, both then sit in silence for the first 10 minutes updating, before spending the rest of the night looking at apps on each other's phones.



The Denier - This is the trickiest one of all. It's your friend with the Nokia N79, the one you love dearly but who probably still enjoys the occasional CD-Rom of a weekend. You don't want to get into a debate about how "expensive iPhones are, and what's the point anyway?", but equally, you are eating at that super-cool new restaurant and you need (NEED!) to create some content around it. Here, you have two options - keep filling their water glass and pray they go to the bathroom long enough for you to check-in and Instagram a shot of your food. Alternatively, you can re-consider your relationship - either with your friend or with your social media problem.



The Responsible Networker - This person knows just how pretentious all this checking-in business is, but isn't going to let that stop them becoming Mayor of Foursquare. Yes, they may choose meet up spots based on the social cache attached to it ("I'm at Shoreditch House with 5 others"/ "I'm at Heathrow Terminal 5"/ "I'm at The Infinite Loop, Cupertino". And yes, they may turn up 10 minutes early to guarantee some alone time with Facebook and the bar's free wi-fi. And though, once their companion arrives it's phones down and interacting in real-time, they may occasionally be caught in dreamland, wistfully composing a description of the night in 140 characters or less.

The Sunday Times Social List

These days, it's not often that you find something decently digital emerging from a traditional media outlet. And, when you do, it's generally from the stable of the big digital hitters, namely Wired, Fast Company and certain bits of The Guardian. But this morning, I noted a little tweet pointing to The Sunday Times Social List. A clear, well animated video succinctly explained what on earth this was all about and (despite the fact that it was not embedded from YouTube and, thereby shareable) I clicked on through.

After a simple set-up interface and a few nice infographics later, I was told I was a "Pioneer" and 129th on the Social List. Not bad for a Sunday morning with a cup of tea.



I'm interested to see how this develops. Unlike Wired's recent "Most Influential People in Tech" issue which was put together through investigative journalism (read nepotism and favouritism), this list seems to be growing out of real influence across the four key social networks - Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn. Even better, its success and failure will rely on the very people hopefully to be included in it. It's a win-win situation - The Sunday Times has their work done for them and meets the leading lights in Social, while social influencers get their clout verified.

It may not have the smug factor of The Rich List, but I'll be watching my ranking like a hawk! Come on Ashton, please RT me into the top ten!

David Armano - Media isn't Social

These days, not many YouTube videos are worth 16 minutes your time, but TED talks are always something special and this TEDx one is no exception. From how to avoid becoming an asshole online, to some pretty sweet and simple graphics on social media, Armano makes some good points.



One part which particularly resonated with me, was his chart on Planning and Improvising. As in life, successful brand strategy in today's world is based on both the ability to PLAN and the freedom to IMPROVISE. Setting guidelines for look, feel, tone of voice, messaging and so on are all vital for the core of a brand, but so too are the more flexible elements which allows the company to respond in real time to its environment.



Right now, social media is one way brands - and the people responsible for marketing them - are able to bring this flexibility to life. But, as Armano goes on to say, "Social media is this hot thing right now. Marketers tend to [go after the new thing] without fully understanding it and doing their homework, or really digesting what's changing." Finding ways to spot and integrate the new and the next, is just as important as being on top of what's hot now.

For a whole treasure trove of charts, graphs and continuums, check out Armano's Flickr set here.

And thanks to Mills at ustwo for Showyou-ing me this vid and disrupting my breakfast!

20 Reasons Not To Date A Digital Strategist

In response to 50 Reasons Not To Date a Graphic Designer...

20 REASONS NOT TO DATE A DIGITAL STRATEGIST


1. They won’t date you unless you are followed by someone who follows them
2. They only want to eat at places with Foursquare specials
3. They will live tweet your date. Even the third one!
4. They will start a Tumblr about your relationship, with supporting Twitter feed
5. They will try to send you naughty pics via Photoswap
6. They will introduce you to their friends via Hashable
7. Their idea of a gift is to get you in on the Beta of a new app
8. Their idea of sending flowers is to take a picture of some on Instagram and @ you
9. If you make a joke they will LOL
10. When you have sex they imagine Pete Cashmore
11. They saw the new viral video two weeks ago
12. If they had to choose between saving you or their iPhone from a burning building...
13. They crowdsource where you should go on holiday
14. They have no idea what’s going on in Libya, but will send you 5 videos of cats talking before breakfast
15. They dream in 140 characters or less
16. They still won’t let you shop in Gap because of the whole logo thing
17. They judge the seriousness of the relationship based on the number of platforms you are connected on
18. SXSW is just a chance for them to catch up with everyone they’ve ever slept with
19. When you don’t update your status on Facebook for more than a day they assume you are dead
20. When they #ff people, you only find out later they were Furiously F*cking them

.... 21. They call themselves "Digital Strategists"
.... 22. According to Mashable, "Active Twitter Users Have Shorter Relationships".

Checking out – a new buzz word or the answer to monetizing location-based social networking?

Last week I feverishly posted about Venmo’s new “check out” service without much pause for explanation or analysis. So now, in a slightly calmer state of mind and with a few days spent mulling over the benefits, I’m back with more.

Venmo is an app which “makes it fun and easy to pay and charge friends” and is currently only operational in the US. Venmo acts as a social payment platform by allowing people to exchange money using their phones. Users can then socialise that transaction by attaching a message to the payment and posting it to Twitter or Facebook. It’s this social element which builds unique user stories around purchases – every brand’s dream.



Last week Venmo announced an extra service, which allowed users to attach their location to their socialised transactions – a behaviour Venmo have termed “checking out”. To me, this is exceptionally exciting.

Retailers are already getting on board with the idea of rewarding customers who check-in to their stores and unlock badges associated with offers and deals. A couple of weeks ago, Foursquare launched the ‘Century Club’ badge for people checking in for 100 days on the trot at the same place – rewarding their most frequent and loyal customers. I’m assuming it’ll be coffee shops and delis who will win Century Clubbers – low value purchases which are part of a person’s daily routine.

For any retailer or brand, loyal customers are their bread and butter – a guaranteed flow of trusted consumers. But for retailers with a higher ticket price, or for those wishing to distinguish between frequent, low-spending customers and occasional, high-spending ones, Venmo Places will be right up their street.



In my first job out of university I worked as the wholesale manager for a small boutique food company. After a few months I noticed that I was spending most of my time liasing with, negotiating with, advising and managing a handful of small independent food stores who, together, contributed to just a fragment of yearly sales. Meanwhile, our biggest wholesale customers were being ignored – placing high orders but rarely given the time to be sold in on new products and up-sold on their monthly orders. Having recognized this, I developed a simplifyed order process for our smaller customers, which took the pain out of managing them, and in turn, gave me more time to focus on our more profitable customers.

This is exactly what Venmo Places can offer – visibility on who your most valuable customers are. Not just those routine-orientated Foursquare Mayors who will stop by and check-in every day regardless.



By seeing spend against check-ins, retailers can map tailored rewards to a broad range of customers. They will have invaluable insight on the customers who spend $4 a day every day for a year ($1,460p/a) deserving little treats, and the customers who come in once a month and drop $250 ($2,400p/a) and who, with a little bit more attention and incentivizing, might be upgraded to a bigger monthly spend. It’s business basics with a modern flair. Call me geeky, but that seems like pretty powerful stuff.

New post now live on Eye Magazine blog. Click HERE.

Re-posted here...

The Self as Brand

I recently wrote a post on the Moving Brands blog about living in the era of the over-share, about how, with so many life-casting tools at our fingertips, we are able to share anything and everything as we go through our day. But just because we can, does it mean we do? Or do these platforms actually allow us to create a rich brand around who we really are by carefully curating and broadcasting a life that is, in fact, a slightly heightened version of the truth?



Most users probably don't think of themselves and their behaviours in terms of 'brand', but that is exactly what social media enables. Apart from those deviants and sociopaths, we've evolved from creating entirely new selves online - like the Barbie and Ken avatars on Second Life. Today, most of us have learned how to portray a pretty accurate interpretation of reality through who we follow, what we 'like', what links we share and the content we post.

As social networking platforms proliferate and the lines between our different selves (the work self, the friend self, the family self) blur and break, it is no wonder that we feel compelled to control how the online world sees us. We wouldn't go to a glamorous party in a pair of old pyjamas, so why would we project anything other than our best selves online?


http://www.howardgrey.com

Today I came across a blog with the mission statement 'This is a blog intended to trick strangers into thinking my life is more exciting than it actually is'. The blog may be called "Slutever…" but the author's frank admission is not so shocking. Who isn't guilty of de-tagging the odd Facebook photo to ensure we look cool, fun and attractive in every picture in our profile?

The location-based check-in services FourSquare and Facebook Places has added an interesting element to personal content curation. The privacy activists may well be concerned about broadcasting their exact location to strangers but, for the self publicist, there are bigger concerns at play, namely where to be "seen" online. The average Londoner could dutifully check in at their tube stop, their place of work and Pret a Manger day in day out, but what's aspirational or taste-making about that? Better, surely, only to check-in at the more exciting places. The places that tell your followers something about you and the kind of person you want to be seen as.



Furthermore, as we identify the self as 'brand' via our allegiances to brands, so companies are reflecting our choices back. More than ever, brands are listening and watching our moves online and rewarding their biggest advocates. From the people who start great Facebook fan pages, to those who become Mayor of their local Starbucks on Foursquare, brands are reaching out and giving them the tools to do the selling for them. As Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, said recently, - "What marketers have always been looking for is trying to get you to sell things to your friends".

From the Middle Eastern beads found in ancient burial sites in Suffolk, to the tribal people of Papua New Guinea using Pentel pens as nose decorations, to the young people of Berlin whose first goal, once the wall came down, was to eat a Big Mac, we have used trading, shopping and brands as a way to enlarge our sense of self. So, is this digital age turning us all into products? Or is it simply another platform on which to communicate a very basic human urge - self-expression? Are the selves that we can create and control online in fact more 'ourselves' than in real life?

Checking into to Hauling

In this month's edition of UK Wired magazine, there is a fascinating article called "Commerce Gets Social - How Your Networks Are Driving What You Buy". The piece looks at different ways innovators and consumers are sharing their purchasing data. From Blippy - a site that lets you share your purchases and see what your friends are buying online, to Groupon - a location-orientated deal-of-the-day site, the race, according to Wired, "is on to monetise the social graph".

Furthermore, and in a move that made me feel like the Winklevoss twins to Wired's Zuckerberg, the piece went on to mention the phenomenon for "hauling". In low-fi YouTube videos, girls share their latest purchase, or hauls, with the world. Stars of hauling have earnt hundreds of thousands of views and lucrative promotional deals. Not so low-fi now.



History tells us that technological advancement and consumer behaviour will continue to evolve. So, can we hypothesise on a potential future based on the evidence around us? We are already hardened "We Live Like This" consumers - surrounding ourselves with the brands, products, services and content which seem best to convey who we are and what we like. This brand-orientated peacocking while pretty normal to us, is instinctive to the digital generation. The 'Like' button is testament to that. Combine this with the new behaviour of "checking in" and something interesting presents itself.

In 2010 alone we went from tentatively checking in to locations on Foursquare in January, to happily checking in to TV shows on Get Glue in December. The fast pace of technology is shortening the distance between the absurd and the mundane. So, what if we can start 'checking in' to products? What if "hauling" goes beyond bedroom videos and onto the highstreet? The scope is huge - from checking in to a new purchase to detailing entire outfit.

So, what data sets could we be sharing with our friends, our network and the brands themselves?
Our username
Our location (place and time)
Our context (captions and comments)
Our spending habits (how much we spent, what partner brands we are pairing alongside)
And the exact moment all the brand's marketing efforts translate into a purchase. That's kind of exciting.

Struggling within the confines of "You are not "creative" therefore you may not have In Design installed" as set by the MB IT department, I have attempted to visualise how this future might look. See below.



Maybe checking it to all this data will prove too much. Maybe registering our every move will render us stationary, but - as Wired states - "The new generation want to scream from the mountaintops what they've bought, and to the largest audience" this hypothesis may not be too far from the truth. Time will tell.

2010 Round Up - The sites, ads, products, services and people that stood out from the noise this year.

Geek crushes

2010 was the year that made geeks hot - largely due to films like The Social Network, Tron and Inception. It was also the year where I spent 10 weeks in San Francisco - home of the nerds. They had me at "tech start-up". Swoon.


Dennis Crowley/ Foursquare


Mark Zuckerberg/ Facebook

Case study examples

Every digital strategy document I write is obviously tailored to the client, but these campaigns somehow kept sneaking in every time. Why? They pushed boundaries, made the most of the medium and enthralled audiences.


Old Spice/ Real-time YouTube video responses to tweets. Hilarious and genius - W&K becomes the hottest agency on the block.


Square/ The new way to pay took the iPad from a big, beautiful iPhone to a functional piece of kit.


MySpace/ Coming hot on the heels of the Gap logo fiasco, the new MySpace logo gave control back to its users, accepting that people want things their way and becoming the visual manifestation of this personalisation trend.... If MySpace was on Facebook, I'd "like" it

Straight talking

Sometimes it's refreshing just to read something in plain English - no "cross-channel multiplatform social media communication plans" bullshit.


The Man Repeller/ Fashion blog about the clothes that repel men. Also introduced the concept of a 'lady boner' to the mainstream.


A Bajillion hits/ Jacking your strat, jacking my lady boner.


Noah Stokes/ This website is so old school it's epic. Who needs HTML5 when you've got it all laid out in primary colours and no bullshit.

Digital life

If, like me, you can't start your day without that surge of serotonin caused by the arrival of an email, then you'll be relying on a heady mix of tools and services to get you through the day.


Google Reader/ Is there a greater feeling for the digitally addicted than over 200 unread articles?



Cross-platform syncing/ Personally, I like living in a world where I can check in using Foursquare and know that the fact that i just walked into a pub will be published across all my social networking sites for my adoring and ever alert 'friends' to comment upon. #don'tbelieveyourownGoogleAlerts

And finally, some of the stuff to watch out for in 2011...


Whipping your hair becomes a cultural phenomenon. I'm doing right now, as I type.


Check-in culture will get out of control, as we start checking in to TV, films and books.

And, finally... cool ad man says, "What?"

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Help them, help you

What happens to brands when the sun never sets online? How can they possibly manage an audience that comes on and offline with the turn of the earth? The Gap Logo 'event' unfolded over four days, but with Brits, New Yorkers and West Coasters all waking up and weighing in every 6 hours, there could be no respite, no time for Gap to gather their thoughts and work out what to do. Exhausted and defeated, they wound up retracting and apologizing - letting more people down than if they'd come back fighting.



By the same token, Foursquare had an unfortunate outage which no doubt gave Facebook Places an unprecedented boost and marked the end of the era when we were happy just to show up someplace without broadcasting it.



Maybe, however, check-in services will be the salvation for brands. As people check into emotions and feelings as well as places, events, products and services, brands will be able to get a hold on what's really going on out there. People feeling angry after lunch in Manchester? Say something funny or wait till 6pm. Everyone jumped up in Austin - give them somewhere to let off some steam.

Powerful global brands of the future will be able to monitor their worldwide audience in real-time via a range of new techniques and advanced date visualization. Brands will discover a broad visibility which allows them to respond and react to their customers on a minute to minute, nation to nation, moving world basis. Big Brother really is watching you now.

Fail whale

Much has been written on the transformational power of social media and its groundbreaking successes. We often read of the massive boost to followers, friends and, ultimately, sales, that mark a truly engaging campaign that crosses and merges platforms. Even social media fluffs can make headline news and still manage to reach a huge audience. What we rarely hear of, however, are the ones left behind - the stragglers who never seem to get off the ground in this new digital world.

A great social media campaign can't spring to life simply because you have signed up to Twitter and uploaded a YouTube video. It is easy to think that social networks, because they are free to join and use, require little material or financial investment. Far from it. Unlike traditional advertising, which is placed before the viewer, social media relies on the 'viewer' to take a far more active role. You are looking for conversation, engagement and buzz. Here are my Top 5 elements which can make or break a social media campaign.



1/ Brand. No matter whether you are an individual, a small company or a global brand, it is vital that you are "joined up" across platforms. From Flickr to Facebook, the way you look, speak and communicate needs to be recognisable, so that no matter where people 'meet' you, they know it's you.

2/ Investment. Creating a Facebook page for your company may be free but ensuring it is well-managed and regularly updated takes carefully dedicated resource. Finding social media professionals who know what they're doing and can authentically become the voice of the brand is key. That's why there's little point in spending thousands on a super-hot, ultra-branded website and then leaving your intern to look after Twitter.



3/ Content pt1. Engagement is built on relationships. Like any friendship, you start out finding out what you have in common. Think about who you are trying to connect with and work out what will draw them in. Become a "go-to" place for the latest updates in your industry, or a unique voice on the state of the sector. Be selective about what keywords you are using to ensure you are search-tastic, and start a dialogue with those already doing it well in your area.

4/ Content pt2. Be appropriate. No, I don't mean laying off the curse words, although that's also recommended. Be conscious of what content you generate for each platform. Social Media users are like shoals of fish, you just need to guide them in the right direction. On Twitter it's about persuading someone to click a link in 140 characters. On Facebook it's about being liked. And on YouTube it's about being too good to keep to yourself. Copywriters, producers, editors... they're your new best friends!

5/ Holism. Nothing and noone exists in isolation. At least, noone with a decent internet connection. Striding into a room saying 'we need to be on Foursquare' will make you sound important, but it won't necessarily make you rich. Stride in saying 'My restaurant is choc full of people on dates, how can we make the most of this?', however, and it's time to start paying more tax. Suddenly you're inviting singles on Twitter to check-in via Foursquare and connect with other singles in your restaurant. Next thing you know you're sorting out a Facebook page dedicated to your hub of hook ups. And before you can say "poke me" you've got a YouTube channel full of love stories. Make each platform work for your audience and they'll work for you.




...Contrary to popular belief, it's not easy. Social media takes time and hard work but, if your product is good and you know your audience, there's really no reason why it can't be an integral part of your business.

The dark future of social networking

Check out my latest blog post on the Eye Magazine blog
http://bit.ly/Camilla3

And for those of you who just cannot get enough of me, I suggest you also swing by the Moving Brands blog too.