Last month I collated a list of 10 excellent Slidehare presentations on social media, including Marta Kagan’s ‘What The F**k Is Social Media?’.
Marta has since updated her slideshow, which is now called ‘What The F**k Is Social Media: One Year Later’. It is packed full of facts and figures, as well as recommendations, just like the original. Some of the numbers are pretty staggering.
All in all it’s very helpful if you want to convince the boss about an investment into this space.
Marta lists a whole bunch of reasons why social media matters, and the takeaway message is that social media has grown up and you need to commit to it. As you probably know it's all about dialogue, rather than monologue, and that kind of interaction takes effort. There really aren't any shortcuts if you want to embrace social media, and for it to work for you.
There are no magic bullets either: "If your product sucks social media won’t fix it." But then again, "If your customer service sucks social media can help" and better still, "If your repeat business sucks social media can help".
Anyhow, do take a look...
What the F**K is Social Media: One Year LaterI'm thinking that we should ask Marta to speak at one of our events...
Chris Lake is Director of Product Development at Econsultancy, an entrepreneur and a long-term internet fiend. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin.
Recommended reports
Customer Engagement Report 2011
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2:29PM on 31st July 2009
Great slideshow nice how you put the banksy slideshow in... Just wondering in light of the rapid changes in social media which social media applications do you think will survive? I heard twitter is already going out of fashion with the teenagers...
3:32PM on 31st July 2009
I have colleagues who think that Facebook is a phase. I'm not so sure. I used to think that, but they're developing constantly and I find it a really good way of marketing companies that couple as hobbies. E.g. A sailing company would be a great choice, rather than a printing company, which lets face it, nobody can get excited about.
4:35PM on 2nd August 2009
vina84.com , thiet ke web , thiet ke website
9:57AM on 3rd August 2009
Brilliant use of images to depict simple stats and facts. Nice work.
Owner at Original Online
4:41PM on 4th August 2009
A little bit keen on big numbers, without necessarily exposing the numbers to any rigour - I mean, "93% of users think companies should have a presence in social media" - really? Who are these well-informed users that they know what social media is, because I'm guessing that fewer than 93% of myspace users would recognise the phrase. And frankly, who trusts their amateur opinion anyhoo? It smacks a little of research questions that have a fairly skewed angle to them.
Also, 14m views for Obama's Youtube piece - fair play, but how many millions watch a single political TV ad slot? 5m active Obama supporters across 15 social networks? Well, that's a fraction of the 215m US people who are eligible to vote (and what do you mean by "active" - they bothered to tick a box on a webpage? That's hardly active...)
One Flickr image for every two people on the planet? Does that mean that the looney I found the other day with 36,000+images online (really, I found another wih 28,000 shortly afterward) has the same social or commercial leverage as a medium sized town? No, it just means he's not very good at throwing away crap photos.
The general points are valid, but the statistics are a bit over-excited, and don't really translate into useful value. Needs more work, and a little more grounding.
CEO at Social Traffic
6:57PM on 8th August 2009
Aidan,
I agree that some of the data is scewed, but when isn't data scewed to fit the presenter's point of view. The point is orrcet though that people are suing social media so as business owners and/or marketers we need to understand its significance and do our own researce and tests to see how it works for our business.
I will argue that the value of Obama's YouTube views is far more significant than a commercial for two reasons. First people chose to watch his YouTube videos, they didn't just suffer through them waiting for CSI to start again. Second they didn't cost a fraction of the what the commercial would have cost to get those views.
Social media is powerful, but it's not a panacea and it's not for every industry, though the Blendtec guys have shown that there are hits in odd places.
Doug