Creative Agency Secrets

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Suw , a client [full disclosure] has posted this question on LinkedIn. Have social tools helped your career?  I answered it.

You may find some of the other answers useful / insightful.

I'm writing a piece on how social tools can help people develop their career and would like to talk to anyone in the internet industries, especially graphic designers, web designers, developers, programmers, sysadmins, user experience peope, etc., about which tools they have used to help get a new job or client. I'm interested in both employed people looking for new jobs, or self-employed people searching for new clients.What social tools do you use?Which ones have been most effective?
Can you tell me a story about a time when you got a new/job client directly from using social tools?

Here's what I found interesting

• There is a percieved hierarchy of social media tools for business
• Different sites function differently.  e.g. FB is social or more casual than Linked In.
• Pre-Web 2.0 contacts are different from web 2.0 contacts and need to be treated differently
• Face to Face remains a strong tool for business closing

And so for your own business develoment:

1. Get a profile on the key social media sites
2. Signpost them from your contacts page on your website
3. Be prepared to invest in spending time on each to learn and then use ieach within the context of your biz dev plan
4. Set metrics and targets for each site.   Review quarterly.
5. Transfer contacts you meet in each onto your conventional business database when you have offline / email / phone data revealed via actual dialogue
6. Be open to new contacts getting in touch but be judicious in filtering them to the ones likely to be useful
7. Use search tools to monitor conversations that use your name / brand so that you pick up on people talking about you who you do not yet follow /connect with

Situation: I do volunteer work at a sports club as a coach.

Working with the Captain, we’ve been working hard to create a group that trains together regularly with a common programme for the past 2 years.

What do I do when a well-meaning person who hasn’t been training in the group recently barges in and starts trying to organise their own group and training programme under my nose.

I feel cross because it risks undermining my work and although well-meant is actually not particularly well-judged.

What should I do?

Please advise.

A nice homespun feel to this site that helps you find people using keywords in their tweets. Twitterel = Twitter for related interests.

I found them because they followed me. 

Ways to use this tool

1. Include in your regular update twitter review
2. set up several key words to find out who's tweeting about your area
3. search for new people to follow
4. Use the helpful mass-follow tool to start tracking the people who best match your interests
5. This is a great customer recruitment tool for building communities of interest
6. And of course you can send out marketing communications to your twitter followers - legitimately as permission has been granted to follow you

Lesson to self - always check out follower requests profiles and their homepage.  May learn something useful!

Image via CrunchBase

A great competition to promote an online service using Twitter to collect entries. 

 We will be posting a trivia question every hour on the hour starting 1st Dec 08 till 25th Dec on twitter. Three people who reply to the tweet with the correct answer will get a $9.69 credit to their NameCheap account. Simple, isn't it

I like the touch that the first respondent wins PLUS two others chosen at random.  

How did they do it?

1. Set up a Twitter account and tell your customers how to follow you
2. Decide on a really appealing competition prize with appropriate entry requirements
3. Use Tweet later or a similar service to set up the questions in advance
4. Decide who is going to do the hourly monitoring
5. Get some well-connected Twitter users to help you promote the competition

Here's what Mashable said about it.

Now it's your turn.  Go for it!

Image via Wikipedia

I have a regular Google alert search set up for myself and my clients for key words (my name and key brands).  This chucks a weekly email to me with a summary of metnions.  

Today I read this one from a link in Samepoint.com  In a search for my surname it came up with my Grandfrather, my Great Uncle and lots of me!

So I read about the site.  It describes itself as a 'conversational search engine".  Neat idea.  I have written before (and here) about conversations being increasingly important for online business development. It claims to count negative and positive words in each post logged.

Here's what they say about themselves.

SamePoint.com is presently tracking millions of conversations, taking place across in more than tens of thousands blogs and social media sites. User-generated discussions are typically not indexed by major search engines, such as Google, as they do not reside on static pages. SamePoint.com converts these discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. As an aggregator, we are able to serve as the nexus where these conversations meet, providing a common point, or samepoint, of all discussions on a specific topic.

And so I'm going to run a few  searches myself. "Heinz" was too wide-ranging but "Heinz Baked Beans " came up well with mentions on Maholo and blogs. David Clulow also turned up Linked in entries, and Trip Advisor (!). 

1. I did one which found a few Wikipedia pages, a Digg review page and lots of blog mentions including a Facebook group dedicated to that brand.
2. its predictive text search is good completing words for me.
3. You have to do the assessment yourself about what the 'conversation' is saying
4. But I've yet to find a negatively rated page. 
5. Compare the David Clulow search on samepoint with the one on Google which has links to Plebble and Ciao review sites… quite a range of difference references.
6. The list of key words that it finds in each entry is helpful.  I used it to compare with the ones I'd used to tag certain posts
7. And the Trends page is nice - is you are looking for a story, this could be a very good resource.
8. But the best bit is the ability to create your own RSS feeds based on search terms relevant to you.  This is FAB,  Far better than Google Alerts, IMO.,

And so, on balance, it seems to be building up its search database but probably worth book marking so that you can check your status from time to time. 

I have had a few calls recently from contacts wanting to take me out to lunch and 'pick my brains'.

Speaking to a couple of other consultant mates, they have had the same thing happen to them.

And so I've had an idea.  Why don't we all get together and arrange a 'pick my brains' lunch for a group of interested companies.  The cost of lunch and the experts' time is covered in the ticket price.  We all get to ask the questions and the answers are written up on the blog so that the wisdom can be shared.

Interested?  DM me and I'll set them up for next year.

Unisfair offers virtual events enabling large corporations and mid sized ones as alternative to physical events.

I came across the organisation following an interview request made by their excellent PR Sarah Tonzi.

They have clients across a range of categories - marketing, recuriting and internal collaboration. but mainly focus on two markets - media companies like Economist, Business Week a virtual event is every aspect of a physical event.  Main hall, exhibitions and conference, networking lounges all just like a regular conference.

In the media model you can drive audience and sign up sponsors and use some content - educational slides and monetise it.

We also work with enterprises - most use us for marketing - they put on an event to do lead generation and nurturing, professional networking.

Events range from product launches, user conferences, product roadshows or educational series.  This enables people to attend virtual events.  Unisfair has made the site easy to use - you go in, create a profile, network (like Linked In - ask for interests and introductions to people of a particular type) the system will make recommendations to you of top 10 to meet.   It matches, ranks and allows you to search attendees.

Using flash and rich multi media agencies can customise our interface -
you can change what the hall looks like and brand it e.g. Cisco China
had a butterfly theme, Citrix had a Star Trek futuristic look.

Background

We launched in 2002 and we went through a slow growth curve but in the last two years our business has grown enormously.  We've done 550 large events in total of which 325 in the last three years.  Large = 1,500 people who actually participate and around 2,500 register.  60:40 domestic US v International client companies.

How to make your conference successful

The important things are headcount, getting the right people to show up.  Job fairs and campus recruiting are popular.  Even though the economy is difficult there are areas with a lot of opportunity e.g. Life Sciences and Biotechnology.

The cost to get started is small because you aren't paying for the hotel fees, food and travel costs! 

What are the key ingredients to a successful virtual event?

1 - set some clear goals upfront.  We track everything that happens in the environment.  We can tell you who registered, when, what they are interested in, who youvisited, white papers downloaded and what I did.  Clearly articulate your goals and Unisfair can help you align the event around metrics that will help deliver your goals.

2 - plan who who'd help put it on (the Unisfair services team helps) brand the environment, create content to put in the environment.  Resources needed, Theme, audiences.

3 - plan the promotion, partners and sponsor recruitment.

4 - consider the tactics of delivering a great event.

What social media tools are enabled inside the Unisfair environment?

Professional networking - profile, build groups, network via text chat and email. Moderated chat sessions and forums and blogs and breakout areas  or a webex and multiple session tracks - tools that an event can use for longer term events e.g. get contributions between events.Everything apart from webex is written by us.  You only need flash on your machine.

One bit of advice for next year for biz dev? 
Do an inventory of your events. Most of our clients look at what they do today (what doesn't work so cut it), what works but budget slashed - cut back and augment with virtual. What can't you do today but want to do.  e.g. KPMG does 'follow the sun' gain relationships across the globe in a single day.
 
We periodically list events on our site and our clients promote events via our site.

Would it suit an un-conference environment?
It matters what you want to accomplish.  If you use a moderator and get feedback and chat from audience contribution. We don't have a whiteboard / desktop sharing application.  And so probably that's best suited to face to face.

For marketing and advertising agencies, how can they use Unisfair?

We'd rather partner with savvy agencies to create the experience for their client and put margin on top of our platform.

3-4 Enterprises in the UK have used us.  Greater London area agency market is interested but we haven't worked yet with many of them.

So, what's holding you all back? 

Joanne Jacobs has written a great newsletter summing up all the great things that happened at Amplified 08 #amp08.  I can forward you a copy as it isn't yet on the site.

Roland Harwood was kind enough to mention me in his article

6. The 1 tweet feedback session facilitated by Rebecca was brilliant and my favourite part of the day.

Love you too, Roland!

Here's my photos from the event.

And so if you're wondering what it was all about.  My contribution to the big,
hairy-arsed goal for the whole Amplified Movement (#amp08 #goal) is to make the UK the world's number one networked
economy by 2010.

That's it.

And we're going to do it by enabling groups of people who already
have reasons to meet, to come together into a group-of-groups series of
events.  At these gatherings we 'amplifiy' the message about what we
are doing to get networked and how we're doing it so we mutually learn
and enable.

The big target is a conference in 2010 which has been styled as a "European TED" [but without the invitation-only snobbery IMO]

What do you think about that?

PS note the main site is now Amplified09.com  

Just submitted a paper to Internet World (submission deadline Dec) and got this reply…. curious for an event in April 2009.

    Thank you for your submission Rebecca Caroe, we will contact you in October if you have been chosen.

    Kind Regards    The Internet World team

Explanations?

This was a conference that nagged my emotions last year - because I thought a marketing conference that's about technology should be showcasing the best available methods for the people who attend.  [backstory and here ].  NB TFM&A = technology for marketing and advertising.

I wrote in offering to do a talk for them but have been politely turned down in favour of 'case studies of major brands' - fine.  

But while writing, I included an offer for the conference organiser.  Let's see if they take the bait.

Natasha – you are clearly working harder to make the social media elements of TFM&A better integrated this year – but can I give you some more advice on what will really help engage your audiences through a variety of channels, including new media, direct mail and SMS?  Last year’s promotion was very ‘clunky’ and did not give a seamless user experience.

I wrote a bit about it at the time, but rather than gripe from a distance, may I work with your conference organiser team to improve the user experience and create the best possible integration of new marketing techniques and channels?

Now one thing they have done this year is to create a group on Linked In for the event. and I suppose I could troll around blasting them there…. but will sit back and wait a bit to see if a dialogue is wanted or not.