Paul Jacobson

I had a couple thoughts at about 4am this morning after I put our son back down to sleep. Most of those thoughts were ways that Melrose Arch might find useful and which may just help build a little community of fans about the shopping district (in retrospect, it is a little more than just a shopping mall – shopping district sounds a little more appropriate). Of course I am going to preface this email by saying that I am just a blogger and a lawyer, hardly the social media experts advising Melrose Arch, but there is a chance that I might have a useful idea here and there.

One of the reasons why photography is banned at Melrose Arch seems to be that people were taking photos there for use in adverts or otherwise for commercial use. Those uses were presumably problematic for a variety of reasons so the Powers That Be banned all photography unless permission was expressly given. An example of that sort of permission is the form I had to fill in last year.

If you visit the Melrose Arch website it quickly becomes clear that Melrose Arch is intended to be a lifestyle destination (I made this point in my previous post). Melrose Arch also has its Twitter profile and Facebook page, both have fairly anemic followings considering the organisation behind them.

I may be getting a little carried away with Melrose Arch’s appeal but there must be other people who find the district visually appealing and would love to know more about it. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much attention given to the architecture, the philosophy behind the development or any of that stuff on the site. Melrose Arch has offered me a media pass to take photos and I was invited to join a walk-around but I kept thinking there must be a more sustainable way to make this sort of thing available to all tourists, local and foreign.

This is the part where I actually get to my suggestions. Here goes:
What if Melrose Arch’s security approached people taking photos and gave them a card that –

• thanked them for their interest in Melrose Arch;
• encouraged them to share their photos and videos with family and friends (not for commercial use of course) and even asked them to tag their content with something like “melrosearch” so other people could discover their content;
• pointed out that commercial photography and filming may only be done with permission from the managing agents and how/where to get that permission;
• informed the tourist about Melrose Arch’s Twitter profile, Facebook fan page and website and encouraged them to follow, join and visit (they could even submit their photos and videos to the fan page); and
• perhaps even had a QR code on the card that linked to a site or special offer of some kind for tourists (perhaps 10% off a coffee at any of the local spots serving coffee by displaying the voucher on the mobile phone the QR code links to).

But wait, there’s more. Melrose Arch should take over its Google Maps listing and add more interesting or relevant information like shopping times, profile and site links and more. It could even encourage its tenants to do the same with their Google Maps listings and add to the body of entries for businesses and retail in the district. Imagine if more people added reviews like the one I added?

I didn’t see any links to or mention of Melrose Arch’s Twitter profile or Facebook page on its website. Shouldn’t there be prominent badges on the landing page or something? This one is a little obvious so I am sure Melrose Arch’s agency is working on something already. Another suggestion is to include a dynamic news stream on the “Press Room” page to include mentions across the social Web, as well as mainstream media mentions. Granted there may well be negative mentions but if Melrose Arch manages to cultivate a community of fans, that stream will be a pretty effective way for its fans to share their experiences in a location potential visitors are going to look.

Other suggestions include Melrose Arch shooting videos with people involved behind the scenes like the architect/s, designers, featured tenants and so on which can be posted on YouTube (or various locations) so visitors can find out more about decisions that were taken when developing parts of the district or the symbolism of a particular piece of architecture. That sort of thing. What about a series of sms short codes that give tourists easy access to snippets of information about these same features as they are walking through the district. I’ve seen a phone in version of that in and around Sandton. The idea here is to engage curious tourists on the ground, while they are immersed in their Melrose Arch experience.

All of this is in addition to Melrose Arch’s social media outreach which should include monitoring and commenting on blog posts, tweets, Facebook mentions, photos uploaded to Flickr and PicasaWeb, videos uploaded to a variety of video sharing sites and more. Melrose Arch’s current social media initiatives are a good start but it can do more. It would also be beneficial if Melrose Arch people would engage too. It isn’t clear whether someone actually working there is involved in the Twitter profile and Facebook fan page or whether those profiles are being maintained by its agency. The former is more authentic and more interesting. The latter is just another PR channel.

There seems to be so much Melrose Arch can do to engage more meaningfully, crowdsource its marketing and awareness campaign and build some buzz about itself as a destination. These are just a couple ideas that popped into my head in the early hours of the morning. I am sure the pros can come up with even more amazing ideas that don’t even have to cost all that much! The real question is whether Melrose Arch recognises the possibilities and has the will to do something to achieve them?

I recently published a post about what I regard as silly rules about not being able to take photographs in shopping malls/centres. I have been reprimanded for taking photos in Melrose Arch (a very photogenic centre/complex), Balfour Park and Killarney Mall. The response (or lack thereof) which I received to my posts/tweets has been an interesting case study in social media adoption locally.

While I am vain enough to believe, not so deep down, that these malls should pay attention to what I write about them and respond in a meaningful and constructive manner, this is perhaps wishful thinking and suggests that not everyone subscribes to my notion of effective use of social media. It also points to a limitation of social media: if the person in my position making comments about a product/service/organisation is not influential enough to have a real impact on that product/service/organisation, ignoring that person (in this case, me) is a pretty low risk exercise.

Sure there was a little buzz on Twitter when my post was published and Melrose Arch replied saying it would get back to me but there is no real incentive for them to actually reply to my questions about the policy on taking photographs in their centre. The controversy was a flash in the pan from their perspective. It barely occurred from other malls’ perspective. As much as we talk about social media’s power, it is an abstract for many companies who deploy a social media marketing campaign as yet another channel to push commercial messages to consumers rather than an opportunity to truly engage with us plebs.

The unfortunate reality is that unless you have significant, real-world impact on an organisation, it can ignore you online with little fear of any measurable consequence. Social media is a powerful force for change but it depends on numbers of people participating in that process. If you represent a small movement, the risk is minimal, academic even, and not worth responding too.

This is also where truly consumer-centric organisations will shine. They will listen to the little people because their business is based on one person at a time and an investment in each of those people is worth making. One company that is doing fairly well in this respect is First National Bank. The @rbjacobs persona may not be a real person within the bank but the person behind that persona seems to be making a sincere and effective effort to respond to the little people tweeting about FNB. It is the sort of attention that makes a world of difference to little people like me, even if my thoughts don’t have a material impact on the bank.

Companies that take social media seriously will shine in their customers’ eyes. One day that attention could pay off when some of those customers become truly influential. And if they don’t, they will still have a few more loyal and passionate customers and all it will have cost them is a message here and there which says that they are listening, they care and they are engaged.

I am working at the airport for a couple hours this morning after dropping a relative off for a flight back home. The traffic heading back to Joburg is hideous so its worthwhile working here for a bit.

I just connected to Internet Solutions’ AlwaysOn hotspot at the Mugg & Bean at OR Tambo airport and I did a Speedtest like any geek would on connecting to a new hotspot and was pleasantly surprised by the upload speed for a change:

High upload rates are really important for the social Web which often involves more uploading than downloading. Current upload rates on ADSL are frequently miserly and this only stifles social media adoption when users are faced with slow uploads to popular social networks.

I’m going to upload something just to experience the boost in speed before returning to my usual upload trickle.

This post will not make me very popular in some circles but the point I want to make here has to be made. A big part of marketing today is a strong focus on social media and for good reason. It is a powerful, cheap and effective platform which I, uninformed about the mechanics of marketing as I am, believe will supersede traditional marketing channels in the coming years. It is also a misunderstood platform and phenomenon and ignorant and so-called social media “experts” or “gurus” are misleading their clients into believing they are truly taking advantage of this revolutionary platform when they are just doing more of the same.

As a starting point, watch this video:

Does any of this sound familiar? Having received a pitch from a social media marketing agency, are you still trying to figure out how, exactly, this stuff is supposed to help your business reach more people and make more money, at least for you?

Besides the vagaries of the business and the fact that many posers will struggle to translate the social Web into sustainable and meaningful boosts to your business, many of the initiatives these so-called experts deploy are not really social media instances, they are pretty much what you were doing before the Web went social except these tools are free and you are paying these experts a mint to use them on your behalf.

Twitter and Facebook accounts being maintained by agencies seems to have become fairly commonplace with corporate social media marketing campaigns. I suppose marketing managers unfamiliar with social media take comfort in the knowledge that someone else is taking care of these services, not realising that social media oriented marketing doesn’t mean using Twitter as a communication channel in addition to or instead of, say, email campaigns or magazine ads.

Social media is about people communicating with each meaningfully. In the context of a social media marketing campaign, social media helps people within a company engage meaningfully with customers. It isn’t about Twitter or Facebook per se but rather what those tools help you achieve. Granted I am a lawyer and not a marketing person, but I don’t think I am wrong in saying that you really should research which social media tool/s is/are right for what you want to achieve. I came across a book a little while ago which contained some great advice for marketers who want to use social media to market their products and services. It is called “Groundswell” (here is the blog, the book on Amazon and the book on kalahari.net) and one of the points its authors make is that different markets and campaigns are best served by different social media tools. No one size fits all and anyone who tells you otherwise probably doesn’t really understand what he/she is doing.

Why am I going on about this stuff? I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while now. Social media posers undermine the good work done by innovative and creative agencies to help businesses make effective use of social media by promising the world and failing miserably. Not a new story but its relevant given the tremendous amount of attention paid to social media. The social Web is not a blip. The Web and out digital communications are becoming increasingly social and connected so it serves as a perfect platform for marketers but their efforts must be carefully thought out and authentic.

Simon Dingle made a great point a little while ago which I read as commentary on authenticity in social media marketing:

I am no more impressed with companies using Twitter than I am with them using telephones. Twitter is just a simple tool – it’s what you do with it that matters.

And no amount of PR posturing can disguise a rotten business. Using Twitter to defend a kak product is just lipstick on a pig.

It doesn’t help a business to outsource its voice to a know-it-all agency that promotes the current social media tool as the solution for its marketing needs. A good agency will help a business formulate an effective strategy using the right tools for the job and empower people within the business to engage meaningfully with their customers. I just don’t see how paying an agency to tweet on your behalf is a good use of the platform at all. It converts a social application, Twitter, into yet another one way communication channel (“thanks for your tweet, we’ll get back to you” from the agency doesn’t qualify as meaningful engagement). Getting the engineer who designed the product in touch with customers through Twitter, Facebook, a blog or even a forum (remember those?) is much closer to meaningful engagement and social media’s essence.

Its all about an authentic voice using an appropriate tool, not using the current cool tool because its the current cool tool.

I am periodically reprimanded by some security guard for taking photos of or in the vicinity of a shopping mall. I have essentially been told that taking photos in or of shopping malls is banned with no real rationale. I took a photo of a renovated space inside Balfour Park yesterday and I was told about the ban and also that photos have been banned for more than 20 years. No-one has been able to give me a reason for the ban. The closest was Melrose Arch where I was required to complete a film production request for filming before I could take photos.

I don’t think I have talked about why I even want to take photos of malls. One reason is that I am fascinated by some of the designs and architectural elements. I don’t know much about design or architecture but some of these buildings fascinate me and I feel this compulsion to share my experiences.

This compulsion brings me to the main reason I take photos of these sorts of places and other areas I visit. I think of it as local tourism powered by social media. It really struck home for me how empowered we are if we have a decent mobile phone with a camera and access to our social networks the other day when we were at the Joburg Zoo. We were walking from one section to another and passed a family where everyone was holding a camera-phone. Rather than visit all these local destinations oblivious to their various appeals, I like to capture the interesting and attractive things I see and share them with my communities on the various social networks I frequent.

A number of shopping malls in South Africa have undergone fairly extensive renovations in an apparent effort to make them into lifestyle destinations rather than just a series of shopfronts. The owners appear to want visitors, local and foreign, to frequent their malls and spend as much time as is possible there. Heck, the parking rates alone must make longer stays lucrative. It isn’t always possible to travel outside of your hometown for a break so local destinations are so important. Consider this tweet I noticed on Melrose Arch’s Twitter page:

When you overlay a social media and the social Web, experiencing local destinations becomes a social event if we can capture our experiences and share them. Geolocation means you can take a couple photos or videos while you are having lunch somewhere or just taking the little ones out for a walk and have that content show up on a map. Those maps can be pretty handy for other people who want to have similar experiences. You know, they guide those potential visitors to the locations their predecessors frequented.

I don’t know why shopping malls prohibit photographs and I wish someone in the know would explain it to me. It just seems to me that the people who make the decisions are missing a valuable opportunity to put their destinations on the map in a very meaningful context, literally. Visitors should be encourages to share their experiences at these destinations and interact with them as much as possible. What about QR codes on shop windows linking to their websites or information about the shopping malls themselves (design, history, future plans). Visitors to these malls are increasingly online, mobile and connected and shopping malls have thusfar only managed to achieve lackluster engagement with the social Web. Here are how two of the higher end shopping malls are doing online:

• Sandton City
• Twitter: 568 followers
• Facebook: 511 fans
• Melrose Arch
• Twitter: 148 followers
• Facebook: 36 fans (JB’s Corner, one of its tenants, has 358 fans)

Imagine if visitors were encouraged to capture their experiences and share them? It must be possible to manage security and safety concerns and still facilitate this? I don’t think that shopping malls can really afford to neglect the social Web as a tool in their marketing toolkits. These malls need to realise that engagement with their customers is more about just throwing up a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. What about engaging with those customers in the malls themselves and encouraging them to share their experiences on location with their social networks. Remember “word of mouth”? Well, this is how it works.

I received a spam item as a Twitter direct message today. It wasn’t from some fake blonde, fraudster or the usual bunch of “@-reply” spammers. It was from a newspaper I followed on Twitter which spammed me using direct messaging:

I may be a little touchy with this one but there is something about spamming me using direct messaging which rubs me the wrong (and a more unpleasant) way. Only people you follow can direct message you so a degree of trust is implicit when you have the ability to DM someone on Twitter. Its one thing to push out this sort of spam in a general tweet stream but quite another to abuse the trust the DM seems to engender.

Actually, “spam” probably isn’t the right term. “Spam” implies the communication is unsolicited, the contact unwanted and yet when I follow someone I expressly want to receive messages from them. So what is it then? I suppose it is pseudo-spam. I don’t particularly want to receive these sorts of messages directly on Twitter, straight into my inbox. Whatever it is, Twitter provides a simple solution:

Di Heuser is a single mom with 3 beautiful children and my long time friend. She started scrapbooking in late 2007 and shifted to digital scrapbooking around October 2008. She launched her blog, Legacy4Life, on 27 December 2008 and was accepted as a scrapbooking designer by two scrapbooking stores in roughly July 2009. Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this because her blog is a reminder of the value of blogging in this age of micro-content and agency powered content streams.

I’ve had a couple debates with people on Twitter about the apparently declining value of blogs and RSS in the face of Twitter’s growth and yet what I see is a departure from the principles and values that underpinned the social media revolution which began almost a decade ago with the introduction of this new medium called “weblogs”, or “blogs”. Despite being an opportunity for more intimate personal interaction, many businesses’ Twitter accounts are maintained by marketing agencies and where those businesses have blogs, their blogs tend to be written by their advisors rather than by someone actually at the coal-face, so to speak.

This trend is more of a return to the command-and-control style interaction that customers rebelled against more than a decade ago and which prompted the famous statement from the Cluetrain Manifesto:

Markets are conversations

Di’s blog is a reminder about some of the values that seem to have been forgotten in modern marketing initiatives on the social Web. It is also a reminder of how valuable and relevant “old fashioned” tools like blogs and RSS are, even as Twitter continues to grow and prominent social media luminaries speculate about RSS’ demise and its replacement by Twitter as a medium for content delivery.

I’ve been chatting to Di about her blog and two things piqued my interest: she mentioned that interest in her blog had picked up noticeably when she started sharing news about her personal life and her family and also that her blog has attracted over 1 000 unique visitors since 1 January 2010 (about 2 days ago). That may not seem like a lot of traffic to some bloggers but consider that the blog launched in December 2008 and is focused on scrapbooking. Di told me that her readers tend to be mothers and grandmothers, not exactly the demographic you would expect to be heavily involved in blogging and online media. Just the same, these scrapbooking women are precisely the sort of niche market books have been written about.

These women are interested, engaged and truly passionate about scrapbooking. Actually, they are passionate about memories and family and when Di shares family and personal stories and experiences she becomes a person her customers can identify with and relate to on a very personal level. This dynamic shouldn’t be new to you if you’ve been involved in social marketing but it does appear to be a dynamic many marketers have forgotten in the race to get their clients on to the social Web. It is also a reminder that blogs and RSS are still relevant to the majority of Internet users and, in all likelihood, your customers too.

There is far too much focus on Twitter and talk about Twitter as the new multi-purpose medium but it still a fairly limited technology, despite its utility. It is really one tool in a toolkit that still includes blogs and RSS. As Di pointed out to me when we chatted briefly about Twitter:

Yeah except you cannot display a layout on Twitter

I realise my insistence that blogs and RSS are still relevant and valuable media on the social Web makes me sound a little old fashioned by Web standards. At the same time too much focus on one or other medium is just misguided. Twitter is a powerful tool and so are blogs, Facebook pages, RSS feeds and even email. I often wonder if all the hype about Twitter has resulted in a complete lack of perspective.

Legacy4Life’s success is due largely to Di’s authenticity on her blog. She shares real experiences with her readers and they connect to her on a very personal level. This is what social media is about.