Paul Jacobson

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.

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 have just returned from a RSS hiatus. The weather was fine and the conversation on Twitter and FriendFeed has been great but I just wasn’t consuming much of the 800-odd feeds I currently subscribe to. So what I did was set up a Google Reader instance using Fluid.app (in other words, I have a dedicated browser window for Google Reader without location, bookmark and menu bars) and that is my primary RSS consumption engine.

I’ve been using Google Reader more and more lately, particularly since news broke about PubSubHubbub and Newsgator’s new sync relationship between its desktop RSS readers and Google Reader rather than its own Newsgator Online. I’ve been hoping that I could sync NetNewsWire with Google Reader and I am pretty happy that it is now possible (although I generally prefer Google Reader itself to NNW). PubSubHubbub has also introduced near real-time feed updates into Google Reader and back out again into services like FriendFeed and that is very cool. Take a look at this demo, for example:

It gets better. This little toolbar, below, which we are probably all familiar with has been getting a lot more use from me and it has me thinking about what the next iteration of the real-time Web is going to look like (particularly after the recent news about FriendFeed’s acquisition and speculation about its fate as Facebook digs in).

Everyone seems to have the ability to “Like” stuff. I’ve been using it on and off in Google Reader although I’m not sure what the overall utility of that is. I have been sharing posts more often and these items are appearing in FriendFeed almost instantaneously. The ability to add comments introduces a sort of micro-blogging functionality to what are otherwise bland feed items shares and turn them into conversation items. There doesn’t seem to be all that much scope to engage in a conversation around an item in Google Reader itself just yet but streaming these shares into services like FriendFeed does achieve that quite nicely.

I decided to play around with the “Email” option this evening and sent a couple posts to two locations. The first location was to my Evernote account using my top secret email address. The result was a copy of the post in my Evernote account which I could neatly file away. I often grab posts that interest me and capture them into Evernote for future reference or to read when I have some time. This option makes it really easy to send that stuff right from the same place I aggregate and read a variety of news items. I probably sent more stuff to Evernote in 10 minutes than I did in the last few days. Everything is in one place, its very easy.

Another place I sent a feed item to is Posterous. This works because when I email a feed item, I send it using my Gmail address which Posterous recognises. The result is a pretty easy share on Posterous (which reposts elsewhere). Take this example of a post Rich Mulholland posted recently as an example:

Google Reader is beginning to look more and more like a central hub for my social and information gathering habits. Given the uncertainty about FriendFeed there is some talk about where to go next and what to use in a post-FriendFeed world (ok, really, FriendFeed is still running quite nicely and will for the time being). Facebook isn’t a top favourite with the FF-digerati and that is the top social network in the world. Looking to Twitter and the heir to the FriendFeed throne is a couple steps backwards so I started thinking that, perhaps, we should be reconceptualising what the social, real-time Web will look like in the coming months and years. I wonder if we won’t see Google Reader (or some future version of it) become a big part of that new social Web?

By the way, also think about Google’s new social gadgets for iGoogle … think Facebook inside out …

This week has been a pretty busy week with Internetix and the Marketing Legislation Conference I attended and spoke at the following day. I still have a couple posts in the works including my views/review of my N97 which I’ve had for a couple weeks now.

I just thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about my main occupation (which has been keeping me busy and away from more frequent blogging). Some of you know that I am an attorney and I practice as a Web and Digital Media lawyer. Essentially I am a social media and copyright lawyer and I founded my firm 4 years ago today after leaving Werksmans Incorporated.

My firm is Jacobson Attorneys and I blog as much as I can about interesting legal issues (at least what I think is pretty interesting) which are relevant to many of my clients.

I also have a Facebook page set up to complement my main website (you can become a fan right from my site – look for the Facebook Connect button at the top of the sidebar on the left) too. I am experimenting with ways I can use the page to add more interesting or valuable content for my fans so I encourage you to head over there, become a fan and let me know what you think about what I post there and what you would like to see on the page.

I am pretty excited about Facebook, in part, because it truly is becoming a social utility. There are over 250 million Facebook users. That is about a fifth of the world’s population that is online and about the same number as people as the number of people in China who are online.

Anyway, it would be great if you would head over to my site and the Facebook page and get involved if the content appeals to you. As always, feel free to give me feedback, comment or share anything you find interesting, annoying or just plain fantastic!

About 45 people came together in two locations for the inaugural alt.conference events held simultaneously in Cape Town and Johannesburg on 4 July. I came up with the idea for alt.conference a couple months ago during a conversation with Hunter of Genius, Max Kaizen. It was an experiment in a few ways. On one hand I had never organised something quite like alt.conference before and my regular schedule made for an interesting few months. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, alt.conference was an experiment in how to arrange something a little different from the the usual conference many of us are accustomed to and, at the same time an event that was appealing to people who were already involved in the social media space.

When it came to briefing our fantastic speakers, I asked the speakers to speak about something relevant to social media and to keep it relevant and engaging for people already in the biz, so to speak. Beyond that I left it up to them to decide what to speak about. I was really curious what they would talk about. I also came up with the idea what I loosely called the “ideastorm” session (not my term although it did seem to fit quite nicely). I asked Gaby Rosario, Allan Kent and Max Kaizen to facilitate these sessions (Gaby and Allan in Cape Town and Max in Joburg). The idea I had for this session was to treat the audience as a panel and stimulate discussions about social media related topics. Aside from that I similarly left it up to them to decide how to run that session.

I ran the Joburg event which was hosted at Vox Telecom (thanks to Lantz Mattinson who helped get the venue connected and set up for us). After a series of small technical hitches (for a change our MacBooks gave us hassles!) were off to a terrific start. I won’t go into the various sessions in any real detail here because I hope to publish videos from the sessions soon (well, as soon as I can get the video off the tapes, edit it, export and publish it … you know, soon!) but there were a couple things about the event which a couple people commented on and which I believe were significant.

For one thing we were all inspired as South Africans working in our respective fields. Between Justin Spratt and Nic Haralambous, we realised (or even confirmed our feelings and thoughts on the matter) that doing what we do here in South Africa gives us a number of advantages. Despite the global economic crisis, we are well placed to succeed in South Africa for a variety of reasons, not least of which a renewal of faith and interest in South Africa as an innovation hub. I have had this growing sense for a while now that nations we usually look to as leaders in tech and on the Web like the United States are, in fact, almost primitive in some respects when compared to South Africa. We are also not as exposed to the world’s financial woes and may even begin to recover a lot sooner. Add increased bandwidth in the years to come and South Africa could well become an even better place to be as a Web professional.

Another important realisation that we came to was that despite a powerful obsession with the tech we use to engage with each other online (whether that tech be Twitter, Facebook, Twitter apps, mobile devices or browsers), when it comes right down to it, social media is more about being social than it is about the media we use to achieve that. Carl Spies and Walter Pike spoke passionately, reminding us that this social media revolution we participate in daily is a hi-tech return to a very human form of interaction that we forgot about. Social media is a celebration of our humanity and of our relationships with each other. The tools we use are just that, tools.

By the time we reached the end of the Joburg session it was clear that there is a need for these sorts of gatherings. They are a terrific opportunity to get together and talk. Max commented to me that there was quite a bit of conversation taking place in the kitchen during the breaks as people went through there to make tea, coffee or grab something cold to drink. This wasn’t at all intended but worked out well nonetheless!

I was also watching tweets coming out of the Cape Town event and everyone there seemed to have a fantastic time thanks, in no small part, to Paul Cartmel and the New Media Labs team who hosted the Cape Town event (and who I hope will host it again in future). If you’d like to get an idea what happened in Cape Town, be sure to check out Allan Kent’s post. Allan was kind enough to MC the Cape Town event as well as facilitate the ideastorm session with Gaby.

My thinking behind having the two events occur at the same time was to encourage a flow of feedback and information between the two events via Twitter and FriendFeed and I think that worked pretty well. There seemed to be a lag with the Twitter stream into the FriendFeed channel but there was a pretty strong flow of comments, reports and feedback throughout the day which left a pretty rich record on FriendFeed. You can find pretty much all mentions of the event which used either “altconf” or “alt.conference”, certainly on Twitter.

While this post really doesn’t do the events and the people who attended/spoke/facilitated justice, I enjoyed being part of it tremendously. I am constantly reminded that we are surrounded with such smart, savvy and compassionate people who do amazing work. We have access to incredible talent and we saw some of that talent on display at alt.conference.

Once again I would like to thank all our sponsors and all the people who helped make this possible in their way. No contribution was too small and without them all, alt.conference may not have been the success it was.

We have already started talking about the next alt.conference later this year. There are still so many things we would like to explore and experiment with. I’d like you to be part of that so head over to the alt.conference site and sign up. Participate in the ongoing conversation.

Nokia invited me to attend a media event in Dubai recently. The focus of the event is the new flagship device, the Nokia N97, and the recently launched Ovi Store. The media event gave me an opportunity to learn more about Nokia as a company and that appealed to me tremendously, perhaps as much as what I learned about Nokia’s perspectives on the N97 and the Ovi Store.

The media event kicked off in ernest with presentations by Chris Braam, Nokia’s Vice President of Sales for the Middle East and Africa region, and JP Sipponen, Nokia’s Director of the Ultimate Product Group, Nokia Nseries. The presentations largely focussed on Internet usage trends with an obvious focus on mobile Internet usage.

Braam said there are roughly 1.3 billion Internet users in the world. Over 40% of these Internet users are accessing the Internet on mobile devices. In 2008, the number of people accessing the Internet using mobile devices doubled. Braam said that by 2012 the number of mobile Internet users is expected to rise well above 1 billion users and we can expect mobile computers like the N97 to overtake conventional PC’s/laptops as the dominant form of device used to access the Internet. Users are currently willing to spend more time without their laptops and use a mobile device like the N97.

Sipponen pointed out to me that consumer demand is a key determining factor in how Nokia designs its products and services. Nokia spends a fair amount of time speaking to consumers both internally and externally.

I found it really interesting to learn from Sipponen that Nokia has a vibrant community of internal bloggers and other employees who provide feedback on Nokia’s products and services (sometimes fairly brutal feedback). There is apparently a fairly high correlation between internal and external user profiles so the comments Nokia receives internally do seem to match up with what Nokia is hearing from the rest of us.

I had an opportunity to interview Sipponen after the initial presentations. The audio from the interview is available through the player below and you can also download a higher quality AAC version of the interview with chapter markers here.

One of the things that came out of the interview which appeal to me as a blogger is the degree to which Nokia pays attention to its users’s blogs, tweets and other public statements, comments, criticisms and praise (Sipponen tweets as @jpzip). My presence at the Dubai event is a pretty clear indication of Nokia’s perceptions of bloggers’ value as contributors to its marketing and development process (I wasn’t the only person there from South Africa, I accompanied Nicholas Boerma from PC Format magazine).

I asked Sipponen about the influence devices like the iPhone may have had on product design and he told me that while Nokia doesn’t slavishly copy competing devices, those devices influence consumers’ expectations (which filter through into Nokia’s focus groups) and Nokia does pay attention to what seems to work in the marketplace. Bottom line here is that the iPhone does seem to have had an impact on Nokia’s product development process and, if anything, it has emphasised the importance of touch-screen devices (I had a couple very unofficial and informal chats with Nokia people who shall not be named who gave me a certain look when I rambled on how great it would be to see a touch-screen in something like the E71 or other devices that don’t traditionally have touch-screens – then again they could have had dust in their eyes).

Above all, the media event and my interactions with numerous Nokia representatives impressed on me Nokia’s respect for consumers’ opinions and desires. This doesn’t mean Nokia is going to produce the “nPhone” and leave it at that but it is placing particular emphasis on empowering users. This is one of the driving forces behind the Ovi Store (more about this later).

As an aside: As much as I love my MacBook and as much as the iPhone 3G S appeals to me, I have far more respect for Nokia than I do for Apple as a consumer. My critics complain that I sound like Nokia PR on this blog. It is true that I evangelise Nokia products and services but one of the primary reasons for that is Nokia’s focus on my opinions and my desires. I haven’t seen anyone from Apple respond to my musings on Twitter. Nokia’s interest in my opinions as a consumer inspires my passion for Nokia’s products and services.

begin woolly thinking …

I tweeted a while ago, wondering whether SA had any Scoble-style evangelists. I just didn’t see anyone who consistently stood out. There certainly didn’t appear to be many career evangelists although it may be I just wasn’t looking in the right places.

I’ve been thinking about evangelism quite a bit lately, for the most part because that is what I have found myself engaged in online. Anyone who has been following me for a short period of time will know that I talk a lot about a couple brands like Nokia and FriendFeed. I’ve been told that I read like Nokia PR and FriendFeed’s local agent in South Africa even though I am not paid by either company, or any other company I talk about (unless, of course, I specifically mention the company concerned is a client). The fact is I love to talk about the brands, products and services I am passionate about.

Of course I am hardly alone in what I do. Most of the higher profile bloggers in South Africa evangelise in varying degrees. One of the most well known blogger evangelists is Mike Stopforth who has written about companies like Dell (remember the post about Dell’s oops when it advertised laptops at a drastically reduced price?).

So what does it mean to be an evangelist in the Twitter age? Is everyone an evangelist in some degree or does it take more than a couple 140 character bursts to be a credible evangelist? What degree of focus do you require? PR agencies certainly seem to be catching on to the benefits of supporting or somehow harnessing this evangelism.

I feel a little blocked as I write this post because I am not sure I am asking the right questions. It is one thing to talk about evangelism inspired by access to unreleased gadgets or lunches with executives but I think a more authentic form of evangelism is organic. It exists independently of any form of incentive or reward (it is worth mentioning that I do receive advance phones to demo from Nokia and I am occasionally invited to lunches, launches and breakfasts in the hope I write positively about the products or services being launched or discussed). I am beginning to think that meaningful evangelism originates in a deep seated desire or need to share information, ideas and opinions.

Actually, I’d love to know what Scoble’s thoughts on evangelism are. In a way he is the stereotypical evangelist and it is pretty much how he makes his living.

… end woolly thinking.

Image credit: 2006-06-16 Robert Scoble Exits Microsoft by Roy Blumenthal licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license