Yesterday (Thursday 29 April), myself and 10 other Berrys staff attended a social media workshop with Christian Payne (@documentally). If you’ve read my post about Using iphones in business, you’ll already know that as a company, we’re taking our first steps into the world of social media and networking, and have started providing staff with iphones.
Personally, I’ve been involved in social media for some time, and I’ve made friends, professional contacts, obtained work, solved problems for myself and for others, and got involved in events and causes that I otherwise might not have heard about; it’s also fun. What’s difficult for me, however, is explaining what social media is to people that don’t use it. It’s easy to reel off names of websites and technologies, such as Twitter and WordPress, and it’s tempting to use some corporate terminology like “engaging our present and potential clients in a dynamic medium”… But that doesn’t make much sense and it doesn’t explain what you’re actually achieving by posting a photo on twitter of the cup of coffee you just finished, or announcing that you’re taking the dog for a walk.
This is where Christian comes in. Christian is one of the early-adopters, and uses social technology more than most. By coming in, and demonstrating to us exactly what tech he uses, how, when, and where, we can start to see where and how we can use it ourselves, and what benefits it can deliver to us and our clients.
You can see that we’re already using a lot of the technologies available. This website is built using WordPress, so we can easily write blogs and news articles, and connect with other networks such as twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, and Digg, among others. Look to the top right of this page and you’ll see the links to some of those networks, to share this article. Please do so!
Among the myriad of technologies Christian demonstrated to us was Gowalla, a location-oriented social media technology that could be of great benefit to us, in listing our properties, our work, our offices, and demonstrating the geographic spread of our people.
Of course, we spent a long time on twitter and we created a hashtag for the event: #mentallysocial. Look at our list of staff and you’ll see many of them are now on twitter themselves, though they’re pretty new to it, so bear with them! I honestly believe twitter is going to be an essential tool for our staff to build networks, manage relationships, and obtain and deliver work in the near future, if not already. The nature of our business demands that we have excellent relationships with our clients, and twitter facilitates that more so than any current technology. Email is too wordy and drawn out, difficult to manage, and suffers so dreadfully from spam that we spend thousands of pounds fighting it. There’s no substitute for speaking on the phone, but twitter manages the short and effective conversations so much better. An good example would be a conference – tweet to a colleague to find out when they plan to arrive, with a hashtag for the conference itself, and not only will you find out when your colleague is planning to arrive with very little effort, but you’ve just promoted the conference to all your followers, and all of your colleague’s.
The other technology that we’re very excited about is audio. Expect a lot of audio material from us soon, and check out Matt Anwyl at yesterday’s workshop:
Matt and Heather recording an audioboo
Audio engages far more than text, and is much easier than video to both create and consume. I listen to two or three audioboos every day, usually related to IT and technology. When driving, I also have a stack of podcasts to listen to as well.
Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be producing more blogs, more audio, and more of our staff will be on twitter. Please get in touch if you’re interested in finding out more about our plans, or have a comment to make in general.
Follow me on twitter: @tom_geraghty.
Great post. I attended one of Christian’s session’s on Tuesday at St James’ Park, Newcastle and he made 6 hours seem like 30 minutes. It is refreshing to see businesses embracing new ways of communicating with customers, prospects and suppliers. Conversations are taking place anyway so it makes sense to listen and join when you think you have something to say.
This chap is inspiring and the time passed really quickly. The techi stuff he brings is really fascinating and there’s loads of exciting ways to communicate. Look out for more audio from Berrys.