On Saturday I had the pleasure of attending yet another great Think Visibility conference. My talk, How To Make Social Media Suck Less, was based on an ongoing discussion with Andy Theyers of Isotoma about trying to work out what makes some social media sites really work and some not.

Around a whiteboard we attempted to come up with a “Social Media Theory of Everything …. in a diagram”. We might not have THE answer as such, but we do have some inklings about what might be called (loftily) Engagement Architecture… about many sites fail to offer any form of interaction/engagement unless you are registered.

We also “discovered” that maybe, a social media’s strapline or branding message or proposition, should have a motivation that is ENTIRELY SELFISH and that the social aspects of your site should be a deferred benefit (not the reason to join).

I enjoyed Julian’s (from The Telegraph) talk because it reinforced some of my beliefs about the people-oriented aspects SEO. The Telegraph has seen a phenomenal growth adding a million unique users, month on month on month. He (rightly) says that using “traditional” SEO or PPC practices that this would at best be expensive and at worst be completely unsustainable.

So, how did The Telegraph achieve this ridiculously huge growth in visitors and rankings? By setting up what was effectively a very small in-house team whose job it was to “coach” the entire organisation on SEO concepts. It’s as simple as that. Reporters, understanding SEO basics and then doing the things they do ever so slightlyly (is slightlyly a word?) differently has made all the difference. A million users a month, every month difference.

I felt Julian’s (and my) talk might have been better if a little shorter (to be more punchy) but was kept entertained by his red trousers. I guess everyone needs a cheap gimmick

Of course, the real work and insight of any conference happens in bar afterwards and I vaguely remember being involved in the development of a genius screenplay (remember 5% of that idea is ours!), the birth of a public toilet doors that make fart noises and an art concept that involved wheelie bins…. and much, much worse!

The Think Visibility crew are now looking for speakers for the next conference, so if you know anyone with something to say about “the things that usually get left behind in the web design process”… give them a nudge. They’ll enjoy it!

As you are leafing through this month’s copy of Cosmetic Surgery Times ( April 2009 ) you might notice that they’re done a feature on using Social Media and that they’ve used a few of my doodles from Nowhereware to illustrate their articles. It’s really enjoyable to see my doodles “in print” - some hard copies arrived yesterday by post .

It’s been lovely to work with Teresa, one of the few people that seem to get my ahem, random sketches. I’ve even discovered what words like “Surgetiquette” mean ( find out here… @TAMatCST ). But the best part, for me at least, was that this was an enjoyable seed that grew in the rich compost that is social media.

You see, it all came about like this…

I wrote a blog article about Twitter which got taken up and passed on by a social media site. It then got linked to by a blogging surgeon ( who knew they existed? ) which somehow got my details in front of Teresa, the Editor at CST. Teresa, using the undeniable linky powers of hyperlinks then found my doodles, many of which are about social media and read them (all) and thought they’d be great to use in this month’s edition of CST. After a flurry of hand-written letters delivered by hand discussing terms we were ready to go (or maybe we used email).

The rest, as they say, is history… or in this case, doodles about social media in a magazine for cosmetic surgeons. Stranger things have happened, just not to me this week.

Thanks for all the lovely, well, comments about my presentation at ThinkVisibility. Mental?! And I never knew that I never finish sentences… I really don’t…

This video is a sketchy look at some of social media projects I’ve been working on, with a peep at the tool I’ve created to help us with our social media efforts called The Engagement Engine.

1 of 3. Social Media slides from Tom Smith at Think Visibility

Inspired by a number of strange things, like events and other people … I’ve done a few new social media-ish doodles over on Nowhereware.com ( done with the new drawing app for Mac, Scribbles ).

In the olden days, circa 2004, it was often enough to create a great site that was SEO’d up to the hilt and to advertise with Google Adwords. All you then had to was sit back and wait for the customers to roll in.

For many companies nowadays you have to slightly more proactive in finding customers, especially the customers who don’t know that you exist and don’t know that you have the answer to the problem that they find it hard to even express. You can’t expect to be seen as a listening company if you expect customers to find you before they get their questions answered. You have to go looking for them.

I’ve created a quick hack that simply takes your chosen keywords and builds search subscriptions to a whole heap of discussion-oriented search sites ( twitter search, backtype, board tracker, yahoo answers etc ).

Once you’ve entered your keywords, it then gives you an OPML file (don’t worry what it means, you’ll find out soon enough) that you can import into Google Reader (or any other RSS aggregator of your choice such as Bloglines or NetNewsWire) and see lots of up-to-the-minute discussions and blog posts about the things that matter to you and your business.

Of course, you will need to prune or add extra sources and keywords to your subscription list but the tool provides a great starting point for finding customers with problems you can solve - wherever they may be.

Finding Customers with OPML Maker…

In the good ol’ days of blogging (circa 2003) before the marketers made them as boring as everything else they touch, you might have said that blogging was often about reflection and writing and even “thinking out loud”, I know I did. No one quite knew what blogs were for but lots of people, especially those that’d mastered RSS were having fun finding out.

One of the best bits of blogging was, and still is, receiving comments. Not only do you get to share your ideas in public but people join is as well. It often takes quite a while to get your first comment and by now many a seasoned blogger really only expects about a 1% comment-per-blog rate, but it’s still a pleasure when people do… you feel that maybe someone is out there listening.

In the same way that Bay City Rollers gave way to sheer brilliance of New Kids on the Block, this month’s social media Robbie Williams-ish fad is Twitter.And like all the other bandwagon jumpers, I think it’s great. except for a few things that may be actually bad for your (or my) mental health.

1. YOU FEEL YOU HAVE AN AUDIENCE

You don’t. Just because you tweet your innermost gems or what you had for breakfast it doesn’t mean that anyone actually read it, they may have been having breakfast themselves or cared.

Yes, you may have a thousand followers but the chances that anyone read what you tweeted is slim and because twitter can be such a distraction once you follow more than 100 people - how many people are turning off twitter whilst they get some work done?

Nobody is listening, even fewer people care.

2. YOU FEEL YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO DO

I like waking up and seeing what the people who have awoken slightly earlier than me have been up to. On days when I don’t have emails to plough through it even feels like “having something to do”…. just checking in!  Anything that presents itself as a list often is masquerading as being “something that needs to be done” but it doesn’t need to be “done” at all.

Catching up on twitter is a substitute for not having enough interesting friends who email us, they are broadcasting trivia and you (and me) are lappin it up.

3. YOU FEEL YOU ARE CONNECTED

You are not. I too was amazed when, after following (THE) Stephen Fry, he followed me back. I felt honoured as I then watched my fellow tweeters attempt to engage him in fawning conversations about where to get a good espresso in Tanzania. Think about it, if you are following five thousand people, if each person only twittered you once a day that would be… a pain.

It feels like a two-way connection but it’s not.

4. YOU ARE META THINKING ABOUT META THINKING

There is the whole problem of thinking about what you are thinking about or not living a life but queuing up things you can twitter about later. This I worry about because it, from the outside at least, can look at best like depressive thinking or in some cases you can see someone disappearing up their own arse in fewer than 140 characters. I’m not sure how best to put this but to me, twitter feels inherently unhealthy.

5. ERIC THE HALF A CONVERSATION

I unfollow anyone who has 3 @follows in a row simply because it clearly shows that the person is so un-empathic that they can’t imagine that I don’t have the other person’s part of  the conversation (and really don’t care) like when you listen to someone having a loud telephone conversation of the train, it’s not the loudness that’s the problem it’s the “having only half the conversation” that’s simply rude.

Blimey.. get a chatroom!

6. THE PEOPLE WHO ARE TWITTERING

Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and the gothic sex mad one that looks like Kenny Everett… Despite lots of celebrities hitting twitter, it is a great list of the really needy ones, poor old Stephen stalling bouts of depression with gadgets and cleverness, Jonthanan with his yo-yo-ing look-at-me weight problems and the gothic one with the hair. I love Stephen, Wossy and Thingy but as people we tend to forget how fucked up they are, which might just be why they’ve taken to twitter with such enthusiasm. Next week it’ll be chilli-and-chocolate collonic irigation or some such.

p.s Of course I’m not fucked up, I’m simply using twitter as part of the research in my job. Ahem.

7. PEOPLE HAVE STARTED USING IT REALLY BADLY

You know the types, woeful self-promoters trying to rack up a few thousand followers so they can sell you something. Marketers like these kind of broke blogging. All technologies seem to have a trajectory that starts goes “1. cutting edge”, “2. hard to explain but valuable and promising”, “3. Popular and attracting marketers”, “4. Old hat and disappointing that it didn’t live up to expectation”, “5. Useless and on telly”.

8. TWITTER HAS A FATAL FLAW

The fact that one’s followers are explicit is bonkers. One of my clients had a crazy idea - to simply follow all his competitors followers. He made a heap of additional sales that day. Is being able to see, and contact, someone’s followers a fatal flaw in Twitter? I don’t know but it is definitely exploitable.

9. THE CONTENT ITSELF

Whilst what I had for breakfast (porridge with blueberries and honey) doesn’t make a blog post, it warrants a tweet or maybe two if you inlcude washing up. And to be frank, like other people’s dreams, it’s as boring as hell… even with blueberries in it.

10. THE DEATH OF OPPORTUNITY

Stephen Fry doesn’t give good tweet. What he had for breakfast is about as interesting as what I had. It just happens that “Stephen Fry” just “is” Stephen Fry. And I don’t like this. The hey-day of blogging held up the promise that, maybe, anyone could make it and become A-list. If your blog posts were “good enough” you would be the one interviewed on telly about what you had for breakfast. All the followers that Stephen Fry has are because he’s a celebrity. It seems like a tiresome retreat to the old guard somehow and in my tweetstream at least there seems to be a goldrush-like race to unfollow Stephen Fry (and tweet about why you are doing it to boot).

11. THE TOOLS OFTEN DON’T WORK

Not only does twitter break quite a lot (although it has been remarkably stable lately), the tools built on top of twitter break even more and the tools that you use to interact with twitter (Twitterific, TweetDeck, Thwirl) are also a pile of poo that regularly breaks. I’m amazed at how strong the need to “have an audience” and “feeling like you have something to do” is that people are happy to put up with something so flaky. The strength of those needs worries me.

Having said all that, I’m far from being a twitter humbugger, I love the mobile integration (on the iphone) the almost right now immediacy, the austere simplicity of 140 characters, tweetpics and being able to GEO locate your tweets to say “I am here”. I worry about twitter.com’s seeming lack of concern about lack of income because I’m really going to miss twitter once they’ve burned their way through the latest raft of funding.

So, there you have it, eleven reasons twitter might be bad for you. For the twelfth, follow me on Twitter… only kidding…

I’ve had a good few days. I had a meeting with a both a PR and Digital Production company about how best to productize my Engagement Engine work. That’s the reputation management tools I’ve been working on where you can find the best places to engage with your customers. And by best I mean the blogs with the most influence and the forums with the most readers etc. For me, the really interesting part of all this work is how research/analysis tools become the seeds for future content creation, or at very least the starting point for strategy brainstorms.

I also had a call last night from the states from someone developing very similar software but with more emphasis on the semantic meaning of the discussions, are they negagtive/positive etc. We agreed to compellaborate (compete and share) in the future. We’re both using python and both could benefit from each others’ work, so here’s hoping for a successful compellaboration (if I say stupid made-up words enough times then one day I’ll start a meme surely?).

During the meeting yesterday I said that I don’t really know exactly why I still blog, that I tend to use it for random moaning. And to prove how random my moans can be…

For the last few days, having not liked or really eaten cereal for 20 years I’ve had a yearning for something with fibre on a morning. Take a look at the back of my Shredded Wheat packet. I did for a while… and started to notice the lies…

• There are no trails behind them of flattened wheat… where exactly did they run from (smiling)?
• The wheat seems too low to me, I mean, ripe wheat comes at least up to just above your knees
• It’s bloody difficult to run in wheat, perhaps they’re bounding tigger-style
• It would probably be quite unpleasant from a dust perspective (it’d ruin the poor girls white trousers)
• Given that they should be squashing lots of wheat, where’s the farmer ushering them off his land with a shotgun?
• When I really looked, that wheat seems to also have ears of barley in there (the grain with the long fluffy spikey bits)
• Isn’t that Kylie on the left?

To realise that a cereal packet, even if it is whole wheat isn’t telling the whole truth is no big surprise but I am slightly concerned about easily I swallowed the lies. Aside from all the confusing percentage of recommended daily requirements figures and carbohydrate/fat/sodium grams per 45g serving it  took a few moments with my mind drifting to get that “hang on a minute” feeling, the one where you see through all the lies and bullshit.

I wonder what other deliberately obfuscated lies/untruths/statistics I’m not spotting? Lies like this can be hard to spot because you want to believe that somewhere in the world, families could be as plainly ( 100% wheat ) happy and carefree and wheat-boundingly healthy as that. The picture would be more believable if a few teenage step-kids were lagging behind just over the horizon sulking on their ipods listening to music that Dad thinks is a complete rip off of Joy Division.

Well, that’s enough rural-breakfast-oriented randomness for today. It’s time for a shopping trip because I see that Cadbury’s, despite the undeniable truth of the economic downturn have launched the Credit Crunchie Bar (which is exactly like a regular Crunchie Bar except that the Cadbury big-wigs were give billions of pounds in bonuses to make it 60% smaller).

I’ve just had a run with FriendFeed and it’s quite good at pulling all these web services (Flickr, Twitter, Blogs etc) together into a single page, a little like the Facebook “home” page without, well, the Facebook. I really couldn’t bring myself to invite all my contacts though, which is the point at which I could see this service becoming interesting, because adding my stuff does little more than any common or garden RSS reader. If friends and contacts add their stuff, then they are effectively helping me keep up with their stuff for me. There is real value there because with the best will in the world, I can’t keep up with the umpteen sites and services other people are trying… it’s not just blogs n flickr anymore kids!

On the train last week, I started work on what I think is a cool tool, that is a bit like FriendFeed but takes a very different approach. It assumes you/we can’t keep up with stuff. This for me is the only tenable starting point for creating web software nowadays. For example, how well-kept is your RSS reader? How many great information sources do you find yourself back at realising you haven’t subscribed yet? How often do you feel that you won’t bother subscribing to something because “you’ve got enough” feeds to last you till Thursday afternoon?

So I put it to you, that a site/service that you need to explicitly maintain is doomed to failure (in terms of subscriptions). It will simply not work, or become too much work… take your pick.

And the tool is aiming to do this… Work out what the components of identity are, such as…

• A blog
• A Flickr account
• A Twitter account
• A Facebook account
• A Delicious account
• A YouTube account
• An Upcoming account
• A LastFM account
• An email address

…and many more. Now the interesting thing is, is that everyone is different. Wouldn’t it be great if you could assume a blog was someone’s identity and from there crawl to find what their Flickr username was etc… but many people don’t blog, but do Twitter or both Delicious and StumbleUpon.

And isn’t it funny that Twitter and LastFM let you have profile pictures which would should/might we use when trying to piece together a Frankenstein’s version of someone’s online identity.

One thing is for sure, when someone lists their online identities we can get a very good picture of who they are online. Take a look at Andy’s blog ( OFFMESSAGE ), you can see what he’s reading (Delicious) and hear what he’s listening to (LastFM) and even to some degree, see what he’s seeing (Flickr).

You find yourself making snap judgements about someone’s online appearance based on what services they use. For example, the fact that there’s no Dopplr link says something (to me). Dopplr users all seem a bit crass and flashy to me, saying, “Oh look at how important I am because I’m in a foreign city”. That of course is thinly veiled jealously and I’ll be signing up for Dopplr as soon as I can afford air tickets to anywhere.

So, here’s the plan and premise…

• Peoples’ identities are made up of content created on an ever-expanding collection of sites and services. Expect this list to be at over 100 within the year for geeks like us. There will be attempts to consolidate systems (like Facebook did) but new facets and tools will keep emerging. Having a “Add service A/B/C” feature is not the way to go, because people will have created their own service “X/Y/Z” by tea-time.
• The people/information I would like to track is not a constant, it changes depending on context. So subscribing per se is a complete nonsense. I’m not suggesting that one can “discover” how certain peoples’ sites are connected, that way lies madness, but I would like to be able to both broaden and narrow my feed-space based on connections and usage.

I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that all of this is simpler than I just made it sound. Read between the lines.

A while ago, my attempt to get my head around social media marketing looked like the image above. Today, as part of my Eat My Own Dog Food regime, it’s turned into an article called…

Five Social Media Marketing Strategies to help clients work out what they’re going to do with Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, SlideShare, Blogging, Wikis and all the other fun stuff out there.