5 Reasons Why Stockport is Set To Shine with Social Media
Posted on 17. Oct, 2008 by Chi-chi Ekweozor in Events, Social Media Strategies
As announced earlier in the week, on Wednesday evening I was thrilled to speak at an event on social networking for business organised by the fledgling Stockport Creative Industries Network.
Over the last year or so, the Creative Industries Development Service (better known as CIDS), one of Greater Manchester’s key creative industry support agencies has been working with Stockport Council to develop a networking forum for creative businesses in the borough.
Wednesday’s event, set rather fittingly amongst Stockport Art Gallery’s Life on Mars exhibition was the first in a second season of networking events designed to bring creative businesses in the area together to discuss and debate key topics and issues affecting the sector.
And so, surrounded by original 70s memorabilia featured in the BAFTA and Emmy award winning Life on Mars BBC series, I spent an enjoyable few hours sharing tips and techniques for using social media for business with Stockport’s creative literati.
The creative businesses represented ranged from those in the visual disciplines: web design, photography, fine art, video production to digital agencies specialising in search.
For those that have never seen the series, here’s a brief summary of Life on Mars from Neerav Bhat’s excellent Rambling Thoughts Blog.
John Simm (Clocking Off, State of Play, Dr Who) plays policeman Sam Tyler. Knocked unconscious by a speeding car on the way to investigate a crime scene in modern day Manchester, Sam awakes to find himself seemingly in 1973. Is he really from 1973 and suffering from hallucinations and false memory flashbacks, was he transported in time or is he in a 2006 hospital suffering a serious coma?
It was a very enlightening evening. Even though I was shaking off a cold and punctuated my slides with some un-rehearsed coughing(!), I enjoyed taking the creative businesses present on a journey on how they could add value to their businesses using social media.
Thankfully, after an absorbing Question & Answer session, a number of attendees came up at the end to tell me they’d enjoyed my presentation.
As usual, my slides are up on Slideshare. For the eagle-eyed amongst you, yes, it’s another slide re-mix! New slides are in the works…
Rather than simply typing up my notes from the event as I’ve done in the past, I’ve condensed the key takeaways for me into the five reasons why I think an emergent borough like Stockport is set to shine with social media. Still, this is a relatively long post.
1. Active Involvement with Social Media, Fledgling As It Is
My co-speaker on the night, Maria Stukoff, a digital media consultant, presented some riveting slides on the business case for connecting consumers and companies through playful interactivity online.
She did a quick poll with the audience and discovered that only 4 of the businesses present had set up Facebook pages for their companies. However, none of them were connected, even on Facebook.
If the Stockport Creative Industries Network combines connecting creative companies through physical networking events with ‘virtual events’ using social networks like Facebook then we may be set for something very special indeed.
2. Time Invested Creates Incentive for Free Use
“Tell me I forget, show me I remember, involve me, I understand.” Chinese Proverb. Quoted from one of Maria’s slides.
Maria shared that 28% of Britons online (7.6 million) played online games, up 16% since June 2006.
Brands and advertising agencies commission online games because of the high return on data collection they enable. They also create incentives for free use.
She shared some of the great work done in this arena by creative digital agency Skive Creative, who spoke at a CIDS event featuring the Independent newspaper back in February.
The numbers speak for themselves, a race game developed for BP, BP Ultimate Rally Challenge has won a number of awards and the Gillette M3Power Jetski Game received 112 million plays from 24 million unique users.
3. Content as shared experience
Much of mine and Maria’s presentations featured case studies of brands using content to create shared experiences on the internet. You can read all my examples in the slides.
She shared details on Snickers’ popular GetSomeNuts campaign featuring Mr. T of the A-Team. The Bebo Getsomenuts activity allowed users to upload their own face to the widget featuring Mr. T, she said. A similar widget on Facebook attracted 12000 users.
She also shared details on branded virtual experiences on Second Life. Manchester-based digital agency Corporation Pop created a Richard Hawley ‘experience’ on Second Life which allowed users to “recreate Richard’s latest album cover using their avatar in place of Richard”.
4. Open Approach to Intellectual Property Rights
One of the interesting questions in the Q&A session at the end was regarding copyright and fair use and how it applied to visual disciplines such as photography on the free form, anything-is-fair-game internet.
Maria and I initially answered the question by pointing out that the ease of publishing to the web enabled by sites like MySpace and YouTube meant that those that do not publish or share their content with others make themselves non-existent. Simply put, they make it unnecessarily difficult for people to find out about their work/products/services.
Maria also talked about the importance of attributing images in blog articles.
I briefly elaborated on following Dell’s lead with their Ideastorm and co-opting web users into co-creating content with you. In Dell’s case, they actively encouraged their community of customers to suggest improvements to Dell’s product lines.
I also mentioned using GetSatisfaction to co-opt customers into doing your customer service for you on sites like Twitter.
The point was that provided the rules of attribution are made clear early into the exchange of ideas, intellectual property rights are more often than not respected by web users.
A lady in the audience from an IP law firm went on to add one of the most insightful observations of the evening.
She shared that in her profession those who were precious with their ideas were often of a mindset that could not comprehend that someone may have done it before!
She also mentioned the IPKat blog which covers “copyright, patent, trade mark, information technology and privacy/confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective.” I didn’t get to thank her for her contribution from the ‘stage’ but I do so heartily here!
5. A Practical and Realistic Attitude to Social Media
Another interesting question was how businesses could combine actively using social media with managing the day-to-day running of operations. The question, asked by a lady artist in audience was “How do you find the time?”.
This cropped up in last Friday’s Social Media Starter course and is a very good question indeed.
I responded by saying that I invest time in the social media platforms that connect me with real people who can help me solve problems.
As an example, I shared how I recently asked for recommendations for a Manchester-based Adobe Effects editor on Twitter and how within hours I received recommendations to 2 real people in my area.
To conclude, we all agreed that businesses struggling to embrace social media faced the cultural disconnect between young and old’s attitudes to social media.
Younger digital natives so-called because they grew up with the web, computer games and mobile phones find sharing information digitally intuitive and natural.
Older folk already have their schedules filled with real life and can struggle to combine learning about rapidly changing new technologies with practising social media.
I advised that the most effective way of bridging the divide was to use social media like blogs, podcasts, online video as a way of creating a living company story that consumers could interact with.
Where you there? What would you say is key for companies considering social media in areas like Stockport and in the wider North West?
Share your thoughts in the comments.
Related posts:
- Next Speaking Engagement: How can your business benefit from Social networking? Stockport Art Gallery
- UK Firms Starting To Embrace Social Media Learning Curve
- The Independent Says The Future Is Digital
- Real-Life Practical Advice on Social Media for UK Marketers : Part 2
- Social Media Usage amongst FTSE 100 companies – Companies 16 To 20: BHP Billiton to Cadbury ADR
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