Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

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Facebook gets it right

8th December 2010

In his blog post “In defence of Facebook“, Joe Leech from partner company cxpartners makes two very good points about why Facebook is so successful.

His first point is that Facebook gets interactions and people.

Facebook understand users on 2 different and important levels. They understand the interaction between user and computer and they understand the interaction between people and their friends.

The second point was a bit of a revelation to me. I never really got why people would use Facebook to send messages to each other. I always though it just generates an email that arrives in my inbox anyway, which then makes me go onto Facebook to read and reply. Joe enlightened me thus:

With Gmail I get spam, newsletters and mostly crap. I might get 1 email a day from a friend. Because of all this crap I use Facebook, Twitter or SMS to message friends. Email is mostly junk.

If I want to message my friend Jon I should be able do it in a way that suits me and suits Jon. I write the message in Facebook and Jon decides if he gets the message via email, Facebook or SMS. I don’t have to remember which method suits Jon best. I can be sure he’ll get the message.

I would highly recommend a read of the whole article; the points are explained in detail, with some good examples.

Posted in Social networking, User Experience | 1 Comment »

Movember at 3Sixty

1st December 2010

With only a small amount of persuasion Jon, Nick, Pete and myself decided to do Movember this year. Movember involves donating your face to raise awareness (and money!) for prostrate cancer. The four of us committed to growing a Mo(ustache) for the entire month of November – starting from clean shaven.

Start of Movember

After 4 weeks of careful cultivation each of us managed to grow a mo, and raise a grand total of £1,100!

Captain MainWaring's Moustache

Nick's growth

Iwein's tache

Pete's Mo

We even made it onto Bristol Culture Best Movember Efforts 2010. Ok, that wasn’t very hard, I just sent in some pictures.

So what have we learnt?

  • We made more money then I ever imagined, mainly thanks to Nick’s dad’s efforts.
  • Those of us who were married before are still married (as far as I know). I think our other halves secretly liked it and are looking forward to next year already.
  • The secret to raising money is pictures. This is all about making a fool of yourself, so pictures work.
  • Nothing works as well at raising money as a personal email to friends and family. I only did this a couple of days before the end. In hindsight, I should have done this earlier. I think the email worked better for all the pictures I had been posting on Facebook regularly(ish) before.
  • We did not communicate this to our clients effectively. At least that’s the conclusion I draw from not receiving any donations from our clients. There is one exception at Cofunds – he was growing a mo too and we saw him a few times during November. We used our company Twitter stream as the main – if not the only – channel to communicate this to our clients. In hindsight, we should have dedicated at least one company newsletter to this. I don’t know for sure, but I think this would have generated more donations.

Posted in Marketing, Social Media | Comments Off

Word of mouth

27th September 2010

This morning I had a conversation with my physio.
These are getting more frequent as I get older!
He said it had been a tough couple of years.
Despite being the most well known and respected in the area.

I asked him
‘Where do you advertise’?

He said most of his competition had stopped using Yellow Pages and that he was doing the basics online.
His site had cost him a couple of grand and he wasn’t interested in PPC or search unless it was free.

He said ‘most of my business is word of mouth’
Attending local functions. He is known in circles like rugby, football. Etc.

It occurred to me that he was having conversations with people that already know him.
He was preaching to the converted.
The large untapped audience that don’t know him, probably never will.
He wasn’t using word of mouth online.

A half descent social media strategy would mean he was having conversations with bigger audiences.
An audience that have chosen to look for information about physiotherapy and are probably in need of one.

He’d mistaken social media as something complex and costly, that other; younger people do.
Instead of seeing it as a natural extension to his strategy of word of mouth.

So consequently it is something other people are doing.
I suspect the toughest years may lie ahead.
I hope not. I need him now more than ever!

Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Social networking | Comments Off

Context is king

19th March 2010

There is a wave coming. The crazy kids and plucky start-ups at SXSW this year were already experimenting with riding it. And if you’re a business that interacts with the public on a regular basis, you better be ready for it.

Social media is coming. Yes, I know we’ve all banged on about “social media” from the point of view of sticking a couple of videos up on YouTube and calling that a strategy. But it’s not. That’s standing at the back of the room, waving your hands in the air in a desperate attempt to get people to look at what you want them to look at, not what they’re interested in.

No, the real “social” in social media is context. Where is your customer now? What are they doing? If they’re talking about your business, chances are they’re on your premises right at this moment or very close by. And they’re probably talking about your business with other like-minded customers, or reading what others have written about the way you operate.

Now, as a business, you have two choices. You can carry on pretending people don’t talk to each other, don’t share their opinions in public, and don’t write about you either in plain sight or behind gated communities. And you can carry on putting up carefully edited, business-curated puff pieces near totally irrelevant to the people who actually spend the money and make you profitable. Or you can roll up your sleeves, abandon your cave painting-based approach to customer service and actually get stuck; “join the conversation!” as it were.

If your business deals with the public, people are writing about you – right now – on Twitter, on Gowalla, foursquare, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace—everywhere, across networks with massive reach, each made up of a bewildering number of participants. And chances are they’re probably on your premises as they’re doing it, too. You need to meet them; they’re smart, passionate people. And they want to meet you. They want to use your business, take advantage of what you can offer them, whether out of choice (for pleasure) or out of obligation (for work).

The point is you can’t stop people talking about your business, you can’t prevent people from writing something about how you choose to treat your customers, for better or for worse. It’s out there, and with mobile, location-based services such as Gowalla and foursquare set to explode in use – as well as Facebook gearing up to offer a similar mechanism for its 400 million active users very shortly – it’s only going to get much worse for you.

Or is it much, much better? As a business, that’s entirely up to you.

Posted in Marketing, Social Media, SXSW 2010 | Comments Off

Do you have a Flavor?

5th February 2010

Flavors.me is a new social media aggregator, that lets you collect your identities and output from a range of common networks and show them all in one place.

Not very exciting or unusual, in and of itself.  But what makes Flavors a bit special is the really simple, attractive interfaces you can create using it – think “interactive business card,” but certainly more fun!

We’ve been tinkering with it at 3Sixty this morning, using the invite code heat.

Posted in Branding, Design, Layout, Social Media | Comments Off

Decorating the tree

11th December 2009

“And so this is Christmas, and what have we done?”  Quite a bit as it happens…

This year, 3Sixty wanted to do something a bit special for Christmas.  Something simple, quick to use and that everyone could interact with and enjoy. And the best way to achieve all of this? Social media.

Now, whilst some of you will be as sick of hearing the term as you will be of turkey on the 4th of January, it’s had an undeniable impact on all areas of life this year.  From news reporting to charity work and brand interaction, social media has propelled itself far beyond even the lofty heights of 2008′s digitally connected ambitions.

So we thought we’d do something to celebrate this, but something that would also fit the season.  The idea we came up with was the Twitmas Tree.  Anyone can post a message (or “wish” as we like to call them) on the tree and everyone else can read it.

But going a step further, we wanted the Twitmas Tree to be something people could embrace and truly make their own.  So we devised a way for the Twitmas Tree to interact with your Facebook account.  Any time one of your friends sends you a Twitmas Tree wish on Twitter, it’ll appear in your Facebook stream too.  Lovely.

We’re really proud of the Twitmas Tree and hope the web at large enjoys it this Christmas. At less than 24hrs old we’ve had almost 200 wishes posted already, in languages ranging from English to Dutch, Swedish and Spanish.  We hope you like it too.

Merry Christmas.

Posted in Branding, Design, Flash, Programming, Social Media, Social networking, Twitter, User Experience, Viral marketing | 2 Comments »

Stopping leaks

12th November 2009

Highly touted new Folk-Rock super group Them Crooked Vultures are embracing social media to give their fans exactly what they want: the whole of their new album for free before it’s even in the shops.

Them Crooked Vultures performing on stage

Them Crooked Vultures, comprising Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters), Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin).

Given how bands like Metallica and U2 have railed time and again (unsuccessfully) against file sharing and “leaked” releases of their forth-coming albums, it’s a smart move on Them Crooked Vultures’ part to beat so-called pirates to the punch themselves.

This on-going embrace of social media and file sharing – to short-cut perceived theft in the music industry – seems to be a continuing trend for a growing number of high profile musicians. What will be telling is how these legitimised pre-releases translate into cash sales, something many traditional, anti-piracy-obsessed media institutions (such as the RIAA) still hotly contest as being viable at all for artists.

Posted in Branding, Media, Social Media, Viral marketing | Comments Off

I love this idea

2nd November 2009

Eichborn the publisher attached some very light banners to 200 flies to promote their exhibition stand at the Franfurt Book Fair.

fly

Posted in creative, Virals | Comments Off

Augmented Identity

7th October 2009

This demo shows your social network(s) profile, media, personal data etc. all hovering around your noggin’ when someone points an at you.

Posted in Digital, Social Media, Social networking, User Experience, Video | Comments Off

Launching brands in public

23rd September 2009

A great new idea by Seth Godin – maybe we should have a page for 3Sixty?

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time…

Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. More are on the way. We’ll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page (and we’ll happily add one for you if you like). Each page collects tweets, blog posts, news stories, images, videos and comments about a brand. All of these feeds are algorithmic… the good and the bad show up, all collated and easy to find.

Brands in public

Posted in Branding, Digital, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media, Social networking, Twitter | Comments Off

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