Social Promiscuity

Today’s post comes from Brian Babin, from Actiance’s product management team.  Brian doesn’t blog very often, but we think, when he does he’s got some great things to say..  let us know if you agree!  This blog was originally posted here.

Your friends are promiscuous, well at least on social networks. How do I know? Let’s just say a friend told me.
This story is about the birth and rise of this friend and the conditions that allow him to exist at all. Think that imaginary friends are just for kids? Not anymore. What’s interesting is that the kids know their friend is imaginary, but the adults with imaginary social networking friends do not.

We Are Social Creatures

People join social networking sites to catch up with old and current friends, to share life events and opinions, and in general to be part of a community. We all want to feel loved and appreciated. For some people, their sense of popularity is measured by the numbers of friends, connections, and followers they have accumulated on their online identities.

More friends means you’re more popular. People may start with the same intentions, such as only becoming social friends with people you really care about and then extending to others you know casually, but over time people can get corrupted. They want more friends. They need more friends. Social networking friends, that is.

An Illusion of Privacy

Social networking sites generally provide security settings to control who is able to view your posts and information. Even if you’re very strict about your security settings you aren’t protected.

Settings change and sometimes go away without you knowing. For example, Facebook used to have a setting to control who could view your wall, now called a timeline. With one change that suddenly no longer applied and people you prevented from seeing your wall could now see it. Did you know it happened? Probably not.

Try to keep up with all the privacy settings and new options. You can’t. The visibility of what you post is controlled not only by your own privacy settings but by the settings of the people with whom you interact. Translation: You have no real control over where the content you post ends up.

A simple rule to follow is that anything you post on a social network can be viewed by almost anyone in the world.

A Social Identity is Born

As an experiment, I created a Facebook profile for a fictitious person. A complete fabrication. Not pretending to be someone else, or similar to anyone. A whole new, yet imaginary, person.

The first step was to choose a name. I decided the person should be male because that’s what I know. His name needed to be rather bland and generic – forgettable, if you will. A name that makes you think that maybe you’ve met or known that person in the past. I won’t say which name I chose because that would blow his cover.

The second step was to choose a profile picture. I wanted someone roughly my age so I didn’t have to be concerned with time-sensitive references, for example, knowing the popular music or cartoons for someone born in a different decade. Not that I planned on using this identity to engage in conversations or discussions, but better to be safe in case the need arose.

I searched for a picture of someone on vacation, because people love to post vacation pics. The picture needed to show the person but from some distance so you couldn’t study their face too closely. And finally, I wanted a woman present as well to ease doubts for females who would receive my friend requests. Surely, if his profile picture shows a woman then he is in a committed relationship and not just out to meet and pick up random women online.

Setting up the Facebook profile took all of fifteen minutes – most of that finding a suitable picture. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, he is not friends with anyone that I am friends with on my social identities. That was one policy I established from the beginning.

Looking for Friends

Now that the profile for my fictitious identity was established, it was time for him to make some friends. You might think it would be hard for a fake person with no friends to find some. Au contraire. I started out with some random searches to find people with more than 1000 friends. I was pretty sure that these people didn’t really know over 1000 people. And I was right.

He started sending out friend requests to these “very popular” people. At this point I had no idea what would happen. Could my imaginary identity make even a single friend? The answer was yes. One by one his friend requests were accepted. Not all of them – it averaged about one in three – but he was no longer alone in this vast social world.

He was making friends: 1 friend, 3 friends, 7 friends.

With each new friend he made he would start to target their friends so his network would grow. Some people may not accept a friend request from a stranger, but if that person is friends with your friends then that somehow makes it acceptable.

Have you ever accepted a friend request from someone you didn’t know just because they were friends with five of your friends, or twenty, or fifty? Maybe you haven’t, but your friends have. The same people who won’t accept a request from someone they don’t know with no friends in common will nonetheless accept requests if there are common friends. “If he knows Bill then he must be okay.” Well, it turns out your friend Bill is an idiot.

Popularity and Pitfalls

Little by little his friend count grew: 15 friends, 25 friends, 40 friends.

I spent about five minutes each day sending out up to ten friend requests. I kept track of each friend request sent out and which ones were accepted. I had to make sure he didn’t send repeated requests to the same person. If the person rejected his first request then they might show up again on the suggested friends list, so I didn’t want to select them again because that would be nonproductive.

Facebook doesn’t like it when you have too many unanswered friend requests, so I had to cancel his old friend requests that were still pending. Were these people afraid to say no to a request from a stranger? Maybe they wondered “How do I know this person?” and thought they might remember him later. Maybe they were too polite to outright reject a friend request. Who knows.

He received some warnings along the way from Facebook saying that he shouldn’t send friend requests to people he doesn’t know. Wrist, consider yourself slapped.

He plodded along, just a little each day: 60 friends, 75 friends, 100 friends.

The criteria for selecting friend targets became less strict. In the beginning he only considered people with over 1000 friends. In time that dropped to 750, 500, and even 300. Interestingly, the percentage of people who accepted stayed about the same, likely helped by the fact that he had friends in common with the new targets.

The Seeker is Sought

One day, not too long after starting, something quite unexpected happened. Someone sent him a friend request. Someone, in their infinite wisdom, decided to send a friend request to a fictitious person. And that wasn’t the only one – he received a dozen friend requests over time. Of course, these people were using the suggested friends feature of Facebook, just like I did. The point is they didn’t care that they didn’t know the other person. They wanted to grow their friend list. More friends on Facebook means you’re more popular in life, right? Being gracious, he accepted most though not all of the requests.

So what did he post as status updates while growing his friend list? Not much, really. Mostly inane comments in general, some observations on current events, and some comments and likes on other people’s posts. He generally kept a low profile, but wanted to show some activity for the sake of appearances.

And his friend list continued to grow: 130 friends, 160 friends, 200 friends.

He stopped pursuing new friends once he was well past 200. The point had been proven. It took about three months to get these friends using a made-up profile, more than I made with my real life profile in a few years. Then again, I chose to be friends with real people I actually know. At least I think they’re all real.

Warm Wishes

Another unexpected surprise came in the form of birthday wishes to my fictitious identity. I created a birth date for him because you need one to set up a profile. For kicks, I left it visible so people could see it. But still, I did not expect anyone to wish a happy birthday to someone who didn’t exist.

Not only did he get a few birthday wishes, he in fact received a large number of them. Many were the standard “Happy Birthday” and “Have a great day!” messages, but some people put more thought into it and posted a nice message. An actual message like you would send to an actual friend.

The next year he received even more birthday greetings. One contained a little heart icon. I found that one to be extra special.

So, feel good when your friends wish you a happy birthday, but know that they’re doing the same to people they don’t know and who don’t even exist. When a person you know from years and years ago that you never communicate with reaches out with a birthday message and you get to feeling special that they thought about you, then don’t. They probably send even nicer messages to people who don’t exist.

Fictitious, Not Malicious

I am continually amazed at what people choose to share online. Perhaps they don’t realize that it can be seen by almost anyone, or perhaps they don’t care. In my experiment I didn’t collect any personal information nor was that my intent. But were I so inclined, there was no shortage of personal and juicy tidbits to harvest.

And yes, I’m sure creating a fictitious identity violates the Facebook terms and conditions. Heck, they may even ban my real identity. It doesn’t matter to me, though. I’ll camp out on Google+. It’s much less crowded there, so I get more legroom.

Social Condoms

Getting back to where we started, what lessons can we learn from this experiment?

• It doesn’t matter how careful you are at screening your friends because you can’t control who they’re friends with and how careful they are.
• Your friends are socially promiscuous. Not all, maybe not many, but I guarantee that some are. Just like sex, it’s not only who you sleep with but who that person has slept with. Which means that anything you post that can be seen by friends and their friends is public information.
• What you post online can be used against you in many ways. People have been fired from jobs for inappropriate online activity. Medical conditions you discuss could pose a problem. Posting about vacations while you’re away can lead to break-ins. Does it happen often? No, but it does happen. Why put yourself at risk?
• If you are one who puts faith in friend decisions made by your friends, then at least change your security settings so that non-friends are not able to see your friends list. Otherwise, someone who wants to target you can first target your friends and accumulate friends in common with you before sending a friend request to you. Now instead of receiving a friend request from a completely anonymous person, it is from someone who has friends in common with you. What you don’t know is that none of your friends actually know that person.
• The only way to be safe is to protect yourself. Assume that anything you post online can be seen by anyone in the world who cares to find it. No court order, subpoena, or government intrusion is required. Just someone with a few minutes a day, half a plan, and a search engine or two.

Your PledgeRepeat after me… My social network friends are promiscuous. I will not share anything on a social network that I don’t want the whole world to know about. Ever.

Who influences you on social?

LinkedIn today added some new features to their “Influencer” program that they launched in October of last year – these influencers regularly publish posts that get special syndication on LinkedIn’s platform.

It’s an interesting add from LinkedIn – who are clearly serious about changing our use of the platform from how we might have thought about it a few years ago – the rolodex, the place to find your new job, or get the reference that helps you get there.    I remember conversations where someone would ask me “how do you know John?” – let me check LinkedIn would be my regular refrain.   As our networks become larger and we have more networks, keeping track is tough.

Robin Dunbar suggested that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”  – which for me is significantly less than the 2,000 plus connections I have on LinkedIn.  Our Dunbar number evens out at around 150.  That feels right to me… so long as its not a different 150 on each network!

This new functionality from LinkedIn now lets me – through threaded comments, engage with other folks who are commenting on an Influencers post and I can mention other folks.   It extends me reach beyond my network.    It’s pretty interesting that what I thought was my discrete network is now expanding exponentially.

Do I like that?  Actually I do.  Influencers by nature are not shrinking violets – commenting on and connecting in this way with those influencers and the folks who are commenting on like content, gives me brand association.    Currently if I want to reach folks outside my current network with content on LinkedIn, I post through groups that I’m members of, so this simply extends me reach to a whole new set of folks.  And yes, LinkedIn it keeps me on the platform.

I can feel my neocortical processor starting to need an overhaul!    But that wasn’t what I started out to say.  The influencer program is great, but its not where I get most of my content.  95% of the content that I read comes from a trusted network of folks who I have self designated as curators for me.  If these people share content, the vast majority of the time I read it.  I don’t have to go looking myself.

Who are they?  Industry colleagues, trusted partners, friends certainly.  How did they get to my (none published) list?  Time, good content and trust.

Which leads me to my questions.

• Who influences you?
• How did they get to that position?

Today’s blog comes from Sarah Carter, General Manager of Actiance’s Social Business. Find and engage with Sarah Sarah on Twitter @sarahactiance or via LinkedIn.

RoadWarrior Tips on #TravelTuesday

#TravelTuesday this week comes from @SarahActiance – and she looks at a few tips if you’re on the road a lot, or even a little..

Before I moved to the USA (just over three years ago now), I worked for Actiance in the UK – living 90 miles from our UK office, I worked from home.  I’d cut my commute to a mere 10 seconds – I could do email to zzzmail in about 10 seconds.  Less if I hurried.  I swore to never again commute.

Roll the clock forward and I now not only commute from my home in Pacifica, CA to our HQ in Belmont, CA, but I also travel quite extensively.  I’ve learned to pack for a two week international trip in 15 minutes flat, to keep a bag packed at all times and that if my passport isn’t with me, then that’s the day that I’ll be heading to the airport.  I’ve also learned great tips on being a regular traveler  and thought I’d share them this #TravelTuesday. Here’s just a few from me.

1. Always travel with spare power.  No matter where you find yourself there are never enough power sockets – airport, hotel room, conference – and they’re always strategically located just out of stretch for your laptop/ipad/phone.  Check out @VictorGaxiola showing his #roadwarrior status at the 2013 SIFMA Social Media Compliance seminar.
2. Always have an emergency shirt/blouse/spare undies.   Seriously.  You never know when you’ll be delayed or stuck in transit.    And when that happens, its usually the middle of the night and there’s no laundry service going to turn around your requirements in the short time frame that you have.    And while I applaud anyone who’s prepared to wash out their blouse/shirt in the sink in the room, drying it with the hairdryer and then ironing is surely some kind of endurance sport that doesn’t burn enough calories to be interesting.
3. Plan time into your schedule to eat properly.   Living off fruit and cheese plates on @united or pizza on @Amtrak might save you time short term, but it’ll cost you in nutrition and indigestion afterwards.
4. Get local social knowledge.  If your network is like mine, it will be varied and you’ll always have someone in that city that you’re traveling to who knows more than you do.  Take advantage of that social knowledge.    Whether it’s dinner companions, or simply advice on transit (subway or taxi?, which hotel? how long to the airport?) use your network to help you out.  Whether its publicly or privately.   I’ve never had someone say no, when I’ve asked for local advice on how, what, when.
5. If you’re a social being – then share on social  – I’ve tagged my check in clerk at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Vegas (and got an upgrade as a result), I’ve met folks in person that I’ve only known through social networks by letting them know I’m in town, I’ve got foursquare offers, check in deals, new followers, friends and connections all by sharing reviews, comments and content.

So there you go, that’s my five tips on being a road warrior – what are yours on surviving the miles,  keeping your sanity and avoiding jet lag? – I ask this question as I sit at home with no travel planned for the next four weeks… but you never know….

@VictorGaxiola demonstrates how to make friends with power

Amtrak Pizza – not a balanced diet

For the People, By the People: A week until Actiance Unleash 2013

Sarah Carter

I’m excited to be in the last week before we get to Unleash 2013, Actiance’s inaugural User Summit, where we’ll be welcoming more than 150 clients, partners and friends from the industry to celebrate, discuss, and advance social business.    I’m especially excited about the social track.  (of course I would be with my focus on that particular area of our business!).

Now the full agenda can be found here and registration is open until Wednesday 14th May – so grab one of the few remaining seats while you still can.  Why should you do that?  Well you’ll love the social track that we’ve put together for starters.  Here’s a taste of what you can experience:

Join the Social Stakeholders in our panel discussion because enabling Social in a financial services firm involves many aspects.  Not least ensuring that all the stakeholders are involved – the earlier the involvement, the more successful the implementation of social tends to be.   From Social Media and Digital Marketing, to Information Technology, Risk and Security, Compliance and HR – the enablement of social requires the buy in, education and advocacy of each of these departments and more.    In this unique panel, we’ve brought together those stakeholders to guide you through the challenges – and give you key tips as to how you can safely and effectively navigate the successful implementation of social in YOUR organization.

Join panelists

• John Malone,  Director of Broker Dealer Compliance, Pioneer Funds Distributor, Inc.
• Joe Correiro, Head of Digital Marketing, Bank of America Merrill Lynch
• Mitch Slater, SVP Financial Advisor, UBS Financial Services

Join us for what will be a lively discussion between interested stakeholders, with strong, but often opposing views and requirements  and take away three key tips from each on effectively working with all the stakeholders involved in social enablement.

Then, take a deeper dive and join Carole Foster, Managing Director and First VP of CIBC Wood Gundy and hear how about “Building Social Media into a Wealth Management Practice”. 

CIBC Wood Gundy began their journey towards building social into their business practice some two years ago.  Hear from COO, Carole Foster, how the organization promoted the innovative use of technology to deliver social media to investment advisers as a key element in their communications tool kit.  Understand the challenges that the firm overcame, the business drivers for the project and where the firm goes from here.  Carole will share candid thoughts on how the stakeholders in her business came together to enable Wood Gundy to be the “first on the street” in Toronto to deliver social as a key element of the business and marketing mix for the wealth management community.

Finally – this conference is about you.  Our customers, our users, our partners – so join “For the People, By the People:  the Actiance Social UnConference”.  We’ll gather for 90 minutes on Friday morning, with the Social UnConference, we have created a space that helps YOU make connections, share knowledge, collaborate and create brainchildren.   This is your session – we encourage participants to give a presentation, create a discussion, or even chair a debate.   Bring your ideas, your intellect, your debating skills – because there’s an entire room full of social individuals who WANT to hear your opinion and who want to engage with you.

The Social Business Team is counting down the hours to our kick off on Thursday 16th May – and we do hope you’ll join us for two days of engagement, interaction, sharing – and challenging of ideas.  Hope to see you in New York!

SEC Clears Social Media for Use: What does it mean?

On April 2nd the SEC issued a press release, which has been widely reported in a number of ways, as to what this actually means for organizations.  In this blog, lets take a look at what it actually means.

WHAT DOES THE SEC SAY?

Here’s what the SEC actually says “companies can use social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to announce key information in compliance with Regulation Fair Disclosure (Regulation FD) so long as investors have been alerted about which social media will be used to disseminate such information”.

The exact text is on the SEC website:   http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2013/2013-51.htm   We’re pleased to see that the content was tweeted as well.  Interestingly, it was in 2008 that the SEC actually cleared the use of websites for the dissemination of key information.  It feels like its been a long five years to get the same clearance for social media.  But perhaps not.   On August 6th 1991, some 17 years earlier the first website was born, at CERN – the first URL for that website was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html in case you want to check it out.  So, it appears progress is being made.  Our world is speeding up.

WHAT DOES THAT ACTUALLY MEAN?

• It means that, so long as a public company announces in advance, what social outlets they will use, that they are able to disseminate key information through these channels.
• In general, key information is usually mailed out or put on a wire service like Marketwire or PR Newswire and also onto the company website.

DOES THIS MEAN THAT THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY WILL NOW ALL BE ON SOCIAL?

• Not necessarily, it doesn’t meant that individuals in companies will necessary be all now posting content through their individual network updates.
• It does mean that firms will need to open up access to social media so that Financial Advisers, Relationship Managers and those assisting clients with investment information can access this information – it really IMO opens the floodgates for firms now saying, that if you have financial professionals who need to keep up to date with key publicly traded companies, then they need to see this information.  If you don’t, then it would be like forbidding a professional to read the newspaper or watch TV.
• Usually when public companies distribute key information like this, they distribute it through a “corporate property” – in social terms this would be the company Facebook page, or the company Twitter account, or the company page on LinkedIn.
• Record retention requirements means that companies will have retain records of what they posted.  i.e. LinkedIn company updates.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO THE DISTRIBUTED TEAM?

• It means that they will require access to social in order to conduct their work effectively.
• As a result of the SEC’s ruling, anyone that needs to keep an eye on key information from public companies will NEED to have access to social in order to remain competitive.
• The socially savvy public company will use individuals to push this content out, along with corporate brands. Take Reed Hastings of Netflix for instance – this whole thing started because it was HIS Facebook page, not the company page.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FINANCIAL SERVICES FIRMS and PUBLIC COMPANIES?

1)      Archiving company updates for public companies will become a must have.  Public companies will need to archive the company updates and any other updates that are related to Regulation FD.

2)      Ensuring that the right person / people approved this content is key.  They will need to prove that it was approved by the relevant individuals/groups in the organization.

3)      Companies may choose to share content to a “Shareholders Group” on LinkedIn, a group on Facebook, or a private feed on Twitter, thus requiring that content is approved and archived, is again key.

4)      Some companies might select individuals to share this key information – so ensuring that the content is again approved and archived is key.  However, the SEC points out, that “The report of investigation explains that although every case must be evaluated on its own facts, disclosure of material, nonpublic information on the personal social media site of an individual corporate officer — without advance notice to investors that the site may be used for this purpose — is unlikely to qualify as an acceptable method of disclosure under the securities laws. Personal social media sites of individuals employed by a public company would not ordinarily be assumed to be channels through which the company would disclose material corporate information.”  So ensure prior notification has been made – and that it is clear, which channels and which accounts will be used to disseminate this information.

5)      Those firms that block social access for the wider team will not be evaluating their policies, in order to provide open access to at least view for instance LinkedIn news and company updates while on corporate machines.

6)   Social networks outside of Facebook and Twitter should be lobbying the SEC – who referenced only Facebook and Twitter – but not LinkedIn as social channels.    LinkedIn is the network that most business professionals feel comfortable with and with whom they connect with business colleagues on much more than Facebook and Twitter.  It’s clear that the SEC needs to understand the company area of LinkedIn, but also the value of the personal network – using the Reed Hasting’s example – if he had used his LinkedIn network update to push this out, it would have had the same effect as he did with Facebook.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

1) Review your social policies, both for listening, and for distributing content.  This great move by the SEC has opened the way for “no business reason for social” to be removed.  Ensure that you’re including all the stakeholders into this review.

2) Ensure, if you are a public company, that any content you are sharing on social – goes through the same approvals that content for other mediums does.  Archive it and retain it.

3) Embrace this new communications modality approval by the SEC.  Those who disseminate key information in compliance with Regulation FD, through social channels, will certainly be in the forefront of the press and generate those softer elements of ROI, that we all strive for.  So make sure you take this into consideration when you’re looking at the benefits of social.

Let me wrap up by asking a question.  If you were to choose one social channel to share key information.. what would it be?

After 3,200 miles, I hit a concrete pontoon at 4.5 knots

Today’s #TravelTuesday comes from Sarah Carter, who fulfilled a long term dream to sail the Atlantic.  Here’s a much, much shortened version of her story..

Traditional Broads Yachts

I started my life as a sailor by booking a holiday in the Norfolk Broads, renting an original Broads yacht, with a mast that lowered to go under the bridges and a retro fitted outboard that kicked something rotten against the rudder.  I also started my life as a sailor by reading a book on how to sail, while being driven to said Norfolk Broads.  Skip forward some 12 years and an idea that had been growing with my sailing experience became a reality.

I decided I wanted to sail across the Atlantic.  Belay that order, I wanted to RACE across the Atlantic.

The idea was to join the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, (the ARC) by buying a berth on a 40.7 metre Beneteau, along with 4 other paying crew, her skipper and first mate.  The ARC runs from Europe to the Caribbean.  That’s at the shortest point, about 2,000 miles. Add in that, I’d only met half my crew, and only for 36 hours.  And oh yes,  the longest stretch I’d sailed before was 300 miles – and this was over the course of a week, in a bikini, light winds and with a cold beer in my hand!.

Arc Route (ish, weather dependent)

It’s hard to pinpoint what I was expecting.  Or expecting it to be like, because the whole experience was like nothing I’ve ever done before. It feels surreal, even now, years after the fact, It felt as though I lived a different life in the month I was away, but it also seems to have been over in a flash, I still remember the bruises on my legs, the tide mark on my wrist left by the watch, how my hair bleached almost white by the sun and how anything more than at most shorts and t shirt seemed restrictive.

I also have a series of snapshots in my head, which still have me smiling wryly, grinning inanely and almost shuddering as I flick through them.  Some are silent memories, others come with bursts of music and there’s a disjointed nature to the memories, to the random reminders of conversations and the way that they jumble together, which rather reflects the emotions of the trip.

We were a strange crew,  four IT people (although why I think four IT people is strange now is beyond me), a chap with his own sign business and our skipper and first mate and we were to spend more than 3 weeks in a confined space in a potentially stressful situation with people that we’d never met could not be one of our better decisions!

The Crew: As we crossed the finish line: Phil, Matt, Neil, Mary, Sarah

Our race started, 2nd across the start line, we rounded the Island and Venus (our Yacht was Spirit of Venus) – those Brits in the audience can summon up all the “good ship Venus” songs you want, believe me, after 19 days at sea, we’d done them all..  – so, we heeled over, Venus went on her side with the wind, as 30 knots of wind and full sails didn’t go that well.  And so began our adventure, and the two days of seasickness for most of the crew..

We began our watch system at 1800 on 20^th November.  3 hour watches during the day and 4 hours at night.  Skipper Bonnie, Neil and I took the first watch, making our first day a long one.   When you’re on watch, its like every watch becomes a day.  I didn’t have 19 days at sea, I had 3 watches x 19 days at sea.  No wonder if felt like a lifetime in itself.

It’s hard to sum up 3,200 miles, and 57 watches into one blog entry, so if you’d like to track more of the trip that I took, then head on over to my personal blog where I’m serializing it, but before you do that, here’s a few thoughts.

WATER on a DRY BOAT

There is very little fresh water on board.  We have a water maker, but it takes somewhat MEH.   We drink orange squash by the gallon.  We wah our hair with wet wipes, or sea water, or not at all.  Crew members who smell, are told in no uncertain terms.  We are a dry boat.  Until we hit half way across.  Then we share a bottle of fizz between the 7 of us, to celebrate half way, Neil’s birthday and my wedding anniversary.  I get to send an email to Nigel via sat phone connection.

NIGHT SAILING

Moonrise

I know the earth spins around, but I’ve never seen it before.  The long nights of two four hour watches, seeing the stars in different positions as the night progresses made it all real.  The Plough and the planet Venus become my lifeline at night, my drift off time.  Shooting stars are everywhere; we puzzle for hours over those with green flashes and settle on space debris.   Yet we’re alone.   On still nights, where we ghost long, or barely move, we plankton spot, leaning over the side, torches in hand, and childlike fascination with glowing dots that go down infinitely.

Dark nights with cloud cover are miserable and last longer.  The sensation of spinning or constantly turning left is overwhelming.

Watching the moonrise is more spectacular than the sunrise or the sunset and sailing by it’s light when it’s full is like having a torch on the sails.  Squalls coming in black and thunderous is scary in a heart racing way, wondering whether they’re going to “get us”, or if we’ll escape with just a little windy nudge on our way.  Waves rush by, in a hiss, fizz and effervescent bubble as they slide by the hull.  White horses chase the stern, faster and faster, almost overtaking, I swear some nights you hear them snort as you see them pull up short out of the corner of your eye.

DOLPHINS, FLYING FISH and WHALES

Dolphins!  Swimming alongside, and jumping up at the bow.  Wow.  Then a pod of killer whales swim across the bow, a momentary panic and they’re gone.  Another whale days later, it seems our constant companion are the flying fish, fleeing prey, flying for what seems like forever, we dread them landing on Venus.  Stinky little things.  We “catch” five in our trip, one lies dead on the foredeck for a day or so, until we smell it’s there, tangled in the sail.  Another lands in the cockpit, while we’re on an all girl watch.  We shriek.  No rescue; and brave Mary has to throw him overboard

Flying fish

(Never have I needed to sheet in so much in my life to avoid it!).  Our worst encounter is the one that lands in the wheel well at the darkest point of night and dies shuddering while Neil helms, talking us through its death throes.  As the sun rises, Monkey spears it with the bread knife and the boys examine it (it has real wings!!), photo it, video it for posterity and use it as bait on the fishing line.

And then almost as soon as it began, it’s over.  We sight St Lucia, it’s dark as we sail into Rodney Bay.   Racing to the end.

We’ve run our engine every watch to charge the batteries yet not engaged forward gear for 3200 miles.  But now, it won’t start.  It won’t engage forward gear.  We’ll have to anchor off in the bay.  No beer for us tonight!  A frantic effort goes into fixing it.  Victorious.  We motor through the narrow gap into Rodney Bay Marina, wide eyed at all the people, the bars.  As we motor through, applause rings out and we look excitedly at each other.  For us?  And then it hits me, that yes it is, we’ve done it!  Made it across the Atlantic.  Blimey.  It’s a stunning thought.

Skipper Bonnie brings us into the marina, slipping Venus into reverse to slow us down, the revs go up and we head towards the concrete pontoon at 4.5 knots.  A crowd is gathered to welcome us, music plays, the rum punch is chilling, our screams and waves of “no reverse” go un heard.   Needless to say we stop.  Suddenly.  After 3,200 miles, we slam into the concrete pontoon and we made it.*

#TravelTuesday from Actiance is just one of the ways in which we get our extended team involved in social.  Our team are passionate about what they do, whether that’s sailing, attending the Grammy’s, Turkey or just plain traveling to the office.  What are YOU and YOUR team passionate about?  What makes your team tick?

A serious consideration of Social Media ROI

This week’s thought leader Thursday commentary comes from our good friend Hyoun Park .    Hyoun is a veteran of baseball, moneyball and telecom-related startups,  a trained social scientist with experience in cross-cultural gender studies; Boston University MBA-trained marketer; and an industry analyst covering analytics, mobility, and enterprise communications.  He’s currently principal analyst at Nucleus Research .

Social media, which I’m going to describe as public-facing social technologies that allow you to both converse and network with the outside world, is described as a new technology where best practices are still emerging and the value is difficult to quantify.  Because of this, companies shy away from discussing the value and ROI associated with social media.  To see if this is really true, think a bit about the history of social media.

Although there are new social media platforms that come out, such as Pinterest, Instagram, and Vine, the truth is that most of the core social media platforms used today have been around for nearly a decade and are based on technologies that are even older than that.  Twitter was started in 2006 and, in functionality, has a lot in common with Internet Relay Chat, which was started in the late 1980s.  Facebook started in 2004 and the friending aspects date further back to earlier networks such as Livejournal, which started in 1999, and the threaded comments associated with conversations, which date back to USENET and the bulletin board systems which were started in the early 1980s.

So, in some respects, social media has multiple generations: 1) the digital savvy, who started using social media tools in the 1980s and pre-Internet Service Provider world 1990s; 2) the ISP generation of AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy; 3) the Geocities and early bloggers generation of web page creators, and then 4) the modern generation of Facebook, Twitter, and other emerging social networks.

With each generation, the value of social media activity has slowly shifted from a purely personal value proposition to one where online branding, network quality, and broadcast have become increasingly important.  As these external measures have become increasingly important, social media ROI has become something that can potentially be calculated.

To truly measure social ROI, companies must equate social activity to a financial business outcome such as increased deal size, customer churn, or service costs.  Reverse-engineering this SaaS figure from David Skok’s http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/ is a good start. By doing so, companies can start to identify the actual contribution of social media to improving business goals and creating dollar values based on increased productivity, reduced service escalations, lead generation, and other key metrics.  The numbers and technology to understand true social ROI exist already, but how long will it take for marketers to catch on?

Hopefully we are starting to turn the corner and will think less about social media as a pure broadcast media mechanism or a pure service channel and more as a set of interactions associated with business outcomes.  Once we do so, we can finally stop talking about social media ROI as some sort of myth and start getting to the financial cost/benefit relationships associated with social media that justify the establishment and growth of social media endeavors in the enterprise.

What to do when social goes bad: The Lesson of HMV

It’s been a momentous day in the Twitterverse for HMV.  (For those of my US colleagues, who don’t know the brand, here’s a snapshot – from Wikipedia.. if you want more, click on the links).

HMV Group PLC is a British multinational entertainment retailing company with operations in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Singapore. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE Fledgling Index. The first HMV branded store was opened by the Gramophone Company on Oxford Street in 1921, and the HMV name was also used for television and radio sets manufactured from the 1930s onwards.

HMVSite Down

Now I had to go to Wikipedia to tell you more about HMV, because the company was put into administration on January 15^th, as you can see from this is all I get at www.HMV.com

As if that isn’t bad enough, what took place on Twitter earlier today should give any senior management team cause for social cold sweats.  Normally it’s great for the brand when you’re live tweeting an event (like we did recently at #IBMConnect)

But I’m not sure anyone has tweeted their own sacking before.  That’s right.  Just before 130pm local time, HMV’s official and verified Twitter account sent out the following: “We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!! #hmvXFactorFiring“.

This tweet went viral with over 1,300 retweets in 30 minutes.

This tweet was followed by 7 others, which told the social world what was going on.

Posts such as: “There are over 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand. #hmvXFactorFiring” and, “Sorry we’ve been quiet for so long. Under contract, we’ve been unable to say a word, or -more importantly – tell the truth #hmvXFactorFiring.” Went out.  And a little bit like car crash TV, we all watched.

Here’s the one that really consolidated for me the difference between those who “get” social and those who don’t.  “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask “How do I shut down Twitter?” #hmvXFactorFiring.”

It gets worse.  Several hours later the offending tweets disappeared from the @HMVtweets feed.

Not, though before you could pick them up on places like Topsy – the news and screenshots of the offending tweets have been trending through the Huffington Post, CBS and Business Week here in the US, and the story continues.

You can see more write ups of the story at Holtz Communications, TwoFourSeven and I found the news out  through superstar @rhappe tweeting it (follow her, she’s great for breaking news like this)

So what can you do to make sure that #hmvXfactorFiring doesn’t end up at your door?

• Social has GOT to be part of any crisis management communications plan.  Period.
• Make sure ownership of your Corporate Social Network Accounts is with a group that is part of the planning.
• Transparency is key.  If you spin, lie or cheat, you will be found out.
• Deleting content, while it might be necessary sometimes (racist commentary, profanity and the like that you do NOT want on your Twitter feed have no place staying there in order to be transparent) should be undertaken with caution.
• If you do delete content, make sure you have a record of it.  You can be sure that the rest of the world already does.
• Engage, understand the mood and the sentiment of the audience and go with it.  Empower the team responding to do just that.  Respond.

What else would you add to how you can deal with social in a crisis?

Without mobile where would you be?

I’m on a train as I write this. From Montreal to Quebec and @via_rail is taking the strain as I head north. At the same time, my mum and I are messaging each other in real time on Facebook, I’m iMessaging a colleague, tweeting and also checking my email.

Every now and then I stop and think how much technology has adapted to,our mobile life and how lost we’d be without it. Certainly the lithium Batteries might be awning all lithium battery devic on planes, following a series of fires, caused a moments thought. I can’t take my cell phone or my laptop with me?? Wow, the providers of collaboration platforms will be rubbing their hands in glee if this one spreads. I can’t imagine that. I can’t even check my laptop or cell phone… That’s going one further than the travel restrictions after 911.

Mobile access to technology that we see for both our personal, and our professional lives has become ubiquitous. Who, for example watched, hero Felix Bumgartner’s Space Jump historic jump from space? My sister in law was visiting at the time. We don’t have a TV here in the USA, so we were watching on the Internet, from laptops. Until we decided that we needed to get a move on and head out – we wanted to catch the tide as we were planning an afternoon sailing in the bay.

No problem. As my husband drove, I watched the proceedings on my iPhone and the relies watched in the back seat of the car on the iPad as we drove to the marina.

There’s also news today that Bank of America is adding 10,000 mobile users a day. Wow. Time and money stand still for no one!!

Today happens to be a vacation for me, but my use of mobile continues, as the applications, the tools that I use in my professional and personal life morph into one, the devices that I carry for the business meetings I’ll be at later in the week, become my communications tools for catching up with the family, for checking out the hotel in Quebec and planning where I might eat a late lunch, or sharing the photos’s from the train and comparing my experiences with Via Rail and Amtrak (Amtrak increased my Klout by using my Amtrak from the California Zephyr on their Facebook page!!).

What would I miss the most if I didn’t have mobile? I think I’d miss the “share” – and that’s not just me sharing, it’s others sharing too.. I’d not see the updates from fellow travelers, or be getting real time suggestions as to what to see and do.

What about you? What would you miss the most if your mobile access was curtailed?

Avoid the Social Ghost Town: Five Tips

I’m presenting one of Actiance’s regular education webinars this morning, my topic is personal brand and how you can use social to build and maintain it.  I’m checking my slides, working through my commentary and I get to my section on establishing a brand presence.  The final bullet point on this slide is “No Ghost Town Here” and that makes me think that that’s actually one of the most important points about building a brand on social.

You’ve got to be consistent.  What point is there in building a community, building a brand and then letting it fall fallow, go to waste and have no content?  Building a brand is HARD WORK.  It takes a heck of a lot of time, commitment and often a lot of money.  Building a brand that is engaged and engaging is harder. And it takes serious commitment to maintain.  If you’re not serious about that, then I question that you’re serious about the rest of your life/business.

By the time you read this, I’ll no doubt have delivered my webinar (its 0900 pacific and you can register here, if you do perchance read this in time), but fear not dear reader, we’ll be recording the session, and as with all our educational webinars, we run them live at a minimum every two weeks, so you can listen to the dulcet tones of one of the Subject Matter Experts here at Actiance, and ask us questions live on air!

However, I’m taking this opportunity to share some tips on how to avoid your brand becoming the social ghost town:

1. Commit.  You can’t be half committed to social.  you’re either in, or you’re not.  So either commit the time, or don’t.  Be realistic about your commitment.  If you’re only going to share content once a month, then, really, Twitter probably isn’t the place for you.  Actually if you’re not going to engage with your friends, followers and connections, then consider if social is the right space for your brand at all.. if you want to lurk, you can do that anonymously.
2. Have a plan.  I know I should start this with strategy, but lets assume you have that.  Now get tactical and look at what you’re going to share, how you’re going to engage and with what.
3. Sort your content out.  Content is hard work.  So you need to look up to bullet point one, and then build content into that.  And this isn’t as hard as it first looks.  Every business has content.  Fair enough it might not be in 140 characters of less, but you’ve definitely get content, and face it with 140 characters, you’re cutting it down, not adding to it!
4. Associate your brand.  You know the values that you want your brand to have (whether your brand is a personal or a corporate brand), so associate it with like brands – re tweet, re purpose, share blogs, follow news feeds.   If you ask yourself the question “should I retweet this?”, then the answer is NO.  Associate your brand ONLY with those that will reflect well on you.
5. Crowdsource:  Work through my list.  If you associate your brand effectively you will find other good content.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the thousand other networks out there let you collectively share content, so look for what’s popular, what resonates with your network and your aspirations and work that crowd (baby).
6. Darn it, I said five in the subject right?  ok this is the bonus point.  And to my mind its often forgotten and missed in our desire to see our Klout score go up and our Kred extend… LISTEN.  (sorry, don’t mean to shout.. but sometimes, over all the noise, on social listening, and THEN engaging is the most important thing we can do.

What did I miss?  What’s your tip for ensuring your brand doesn’t become a social ghost town?

PS:  My graphic today comes from Bodie State Park, California – a ghost town apart from the park rangers, and well worth the trip, its a superb state park with some great stories!