Tagged: Richard Stacy

The three per cent rule: why social media is no good for reaching 97 per cent of your audience

3 per centAt the end of last year I was teaching a session on social media in a masters of communication course at the London campus of the European Communication School.  In total I was lecturing to 30 students in two groups.  Most of the students were French or Belgian and in their early twenties.  At the start of the course I conducted an exercise designed to define how  people actually use Facebook, based on the students’ own experiences.   What this exercise revealed was that everyone used Facebook to keep in contact with their friends and that this activity constituted the vast majority of the time spent on Facebook.  No real surprise there.

I then looked at engagement with brands.  Of the 30, only three confessed that they used Facebook to have any sort of contact with brands and of these three, two only did this in response to some form of incentive – getting freebies, entering competitions etc.  And only one person said that they used Facebook to follow brands in any proactive way – albeit time spent doing this was very small, compared to time spent keeping in contact with friends.

I also suspect I am being generous here.  The group I was talking to (early twenties graduates) comprised people who are probably the most engaged with social media generally.  If we were talking an audience more typical for most consumer products we would more likely find that one in 30 (i.e. three per cent) coming in at somewhere closer to one per cent.  This is, of course, just one sample – but I expect that the numbers I was generating hear are not wildly out of line with a more general case.  In fact, I am tempted to do a bit of work to try and bear this out.

These are not especially surprising results – I suspect they would resonate with almost everyone’s personal usage of Facebook (possibly with social media in general).  However, another way of looking at these results is to say that while 100 per cent of your consumers may be on Facebook, you could only ever use Facebook to reach 3 per cent of them.  Or to put it another way, a Facebook page is a way of not reaching 97 per cent of your audience.  Just imagine creating a new campaign and your media agency then coming to you with a plan which didn’t reach 97 per cent of your audience.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with reaching less that three per cent of your audience – provided what you do with this three per cent generates significantly more value per contact, that the type of value we are accustomed to generating when we are seeking to reach 100 per cent of our audience.  In fact all effective social media strategies are defined by the fact that they are focused, at any one time, on individuals or very small groups and fractions of a total audience.

This is all obvious stuff – but it is not apparently obvious.  Most organisations are still approaching Facebook, and social media generally, with approaches that are designed for audiences, rather than individuals.  They still believe, for example, that the name of the game is content – forgetting that content is a concept that only works with an audience.   They still believe that it is a good idea to run competitions in Facebook, because this activity is proven to create the most Facebook engagement, forgetting that there is no point in running a competition that more than 97 per cent of your audience will never see.  But perhaps if brands are so keen to export traditional marketing approaches into social media, if we also export traditional media planning approaches into this space (i.e. advocating the design of campaigns that reach basically no-one) – this is a way of highlighting the errors of this thinking in a way which people can understand.

P.S. I first published this, in error as a page – which I will keep (but remove from navigation) in order to preserve its link, which several people RT’d

 

The above is what I think. This is what I do

http://richardstacy.com/advanced-social-media-training

The three per cent rule

3 per cent(This is a page, but it was meant to be a post.  Here is the proper post.  I have kept this page alive because people have RT’d the link, but I have hidden it from navigation)

At the end of last year I was teaching a session on social media in a masters of communication course at the London campus of the European Communication School.  In total I was lecturing to 30 students in two groups.  Most of the students were French or Belgian and in their early twenties.  At the start of the course I conducted an exercise designed to define how  people actually use Facebook, based on the students’ own experiences.   What this exercise revealed was that everyone used Facebook to keep in contact with their friends and that this activity constituted the vast majority of the time spent on Facebook.  No real surprise there.

I then looked at engagement with brands.  Of the 30, only three confessed that they used Facebook to have any sort of contact with brands and of these three, two only did this in response to some form of incentive – getting freebies, entering competitions etc.  And only one person said that they used Facebook to follow brands in any proactive way – albeit time spent doing this was very small, compared to time spent keeping in contact with friends.

I also suspect I am being generous here.  Continue reading

Truth in Twitterland

Here is a very interesting article by Alan Patrick.  It compares the Google and the Twitter windows on a current news story and proposes that the view through the Twitter window is actually more nuanced and investigative than the rather one-dimensional, or populist, view provided by Google.

This certainly chimes with my own experience.  Some while back I compared the Twitter versus tabloid media view, in relation to the Ryan Giggs / super injunction fiasco in the UK in 2011.  The conclusion I reached here was that the Twitter view was, again, much more nuanced and far less sensationalist than the view the tabloid press traditionally put out in these sort of cases.  Most people were really not that interested in Ryan Giggs love life, certainly not to the extent which might justify front page spreads.  Which is probably why many tabloid journalists are so scornful of ‘the people on Twitter’, because Twitter deflates the tabloids’ ability to titilate.

There is a further, more recent example.  Last year the BBC and its Newsnight programme got into a huge amount of hot water over the ‘naming’ of a former Tory politician, Lord McAlpine, as a paedophile at the centre of a child abuse ring.  Lord McAlpine is not a paedophile and while the BBC did not actually name him, it was inferred that his name was the one that was heading a list names that were ‘circulating on the internet’ – primarily Twitter.  McAlpine himself then went on to instigate legal proceeding against some of those people on Twitter deemed responsible.  This just goes to show how fundamentally untrustworthy and downright evil this whole Twitter-website-internet thing is – one might have thought.

Except – as this story was brewing I went and had a look ‘at Twitter’ to see exactly what was going on.  Now whilst Lord McAlpine’s name certainly came up, along with a whole list of other, frequently ludicrous, suggestions – there was another name which was much more firmly linked to much more specific allegations.  If one had looked at Twitter in the whole, you would not have reached the conclusion that Lord McAlpine was the prime suspect in this case.  I was thus astonished to see the BBC allowing McAlpine’s name to enter the frame on the basis that this was already out there on Twitter, because while some individual tweets may have been suggesting this, a consideration of the collective view of Twitter would have led one to a very different conclusion.  (I shall not name who Twitter saw as the prime suspect for obvious reasons).

Thus – the BBC effectively inferred that Lord McAlpine was the suspect – and got it wrong.  And the evil untrustworthy Twitter may not have got it right (we shall never know the truth because the powers that be have dropped this subject like a hot potato), but it didn’t get it as wrong as the BBC did.

The main point, from all of this, is that news in the social digital space, cannot be defined in an institutional way any more.  News is becoming a raw material, not a finished product and the distillation of what is truth is shifting from institutions into processes.  You can’t understand Twitter as an institution, you can only understand it as a process.  Twitter (unlike Newsnight) was not purporting to tell me that something was true or not true – it simply provided me with a process that allowed me to make my own conclusions.   And key to this process working effectively is transparency and the ability to put information in context.  It is what I call the ability to see the whole probability curve of news and where upon it, any individual bit of information sits.

And going back to Alan Patrick’s article, Twitter is much better placed to deliver against this than Google – certainly when it comes to news – because it doesn’t attempt to attach a score to a particular piece of information in order to rank it (or define its truthfulness).  Instead it allows you to see the spread of opinion and apply a probability approach.   Google’s strength is in other areas, where seeing the curve is less important.  Thus Google is good at answering question such as ‘when to prune raspberries?’ whereas Twitter is better at answering questions such as ‘is this news story really true?’

 

Public communication in the evolving media landscape: adapt or resist?

Advanced social media training – it’s what I do

Richard Stacy Social Media TrainingI have been in the social media game now since 2006, but it is really only now that I have been able to put a finger on what it is I actually do – which is advanced social media training (click here to check this out and here to download the Infographic).

Because I always wanted to be a sole practioner, rather than create an agency, I previously described myself as a social media consultant.  Consultant is a label which sounds professional and strategic and in many ways it wasn’t a bad label because what I ended up doing largely revolved around producing strategies.

I remember one such project, which was quite a large assignment, culminating in a 3 hour session with the executive team of the organisation.  Two things really stick in my mind from this.  The first was the comment from the CEO at the end of the session.  He said, “that was fantastic.  I really enjoyed the session, except the bit where you told me my business model was going to have to change.”  The other was a comment from the marketing director, during a follow-up implementation session where she said, “the trouble with a social media strategy is that I don’t know where it stops, because I don’t know how to implement”.

I drew two conclusions from this. First, the production of a social media strategy has to be turned into a process so that an organisation can work both strategy and implementation  out for itself, rather than having something delivered.  This conclusion was strengthened when I finally realised that social media is actually much better understood as a business process, rather than a set of communications outputs.  The second conclusion was that there was no point in trying to draw a picture of how the world was going to change as a result of social media and the empowerment of consumers or customers, because embracing this is too difficult for most organisations – they have to see the flames and smell the smoke of burning business models in order to create the necessary sense of urgency.  Also, most organisations, especially the large ones, are not going to turn their businesses upside down because some upstart tells them trouble is on the way.  If McKinsey tells them trouble is on the way, that is another matter.  But even then, McKinsey would probably have to say it many times and extract many millions in consulting fees before the point strikes home.

As a result, while I still work on strategic projects, usually in cooperation with marketing or digital agencies, I dropped the idea that I provide social media strategies and shifted instead to the idea that I help design and implement a process – i.e. training.  The only problem with this is that training comes in smaller chunks, especially as I have refined my core offer down into a one-day session and it therefore requires greater volume of projects.  This is why my New Years resolution was to become more focused on promoting my training offer.  Hence a distillation of what I do in an Infographic (download and distribute widely!) some tweaks to the website (I now use WordPress.org so I can avail myself of the fabulous Yoast to optimise my posts) and a campaign where I will have to practise what I preach and get out there in the digital space within which people are asking the question, for which my training is the answer.

Eurostar: good traditional customer service, poor social customer service

FailureI use Eurostar in many of my social media training sessions and presentations as an example of an organisation that (still) hasn’t really got social media.  The reason for this is that while their traditional customer care may be quite good, it hasn’t yet worked out how to do real-time customer care, using social media.

I use a couple of examples: one is an instance of lack of response to some rather poor food I was once served (see this post) and the other is in relation to a horrible delay I experienced nearly a year ago.  The issue, in both cases, is that fact that Eurostar are not doing the number one thing any organisation needs to do first in social media: listening to their customers and responding in real time. Continue reading

Big Data: gold mine or fool’s gold?

(This was published in the print edition of Digital Age in Turkey earlier this month.  It also appeared as few days later as a Digital Age blog post – if you want to read it in Turkish!)

There is a lot of buzz about the concept of Big Data.  But it is really the potential gold mine that some are suggesting?

Back in July I was at the Marketing Week Live show in London participating in an event organised by IBM.  We were looking at data and consumer relationships within fashion retailing, using high-end women’s shoes as the example.  The big issue fashion retailers face is that everyone walking into a store is a stranger.  The sales assistants know nothing about them, other than what they can deduce from their appearance and any conversation they can then strike-up.  We therefore asked ourselves the question: how might it be possible to use data from the digital environment so that potential customers were no longer strangers?  How might we be able to create a digital relationship so that when a potential consumer walks through the door the sales assistant would be able call-up this relationship history and pull this on-line contact into an off-line sales conversation?  One of the IBM analysts put it thus, “we need to be able to identify the exact moment a potential consumer starts to think about buying a new pair of shoes, identified from conversations they have with their friends in social networks and be able to then join those conversations”.

Welcome to the world of Big Data.  In the world of Big Data it is theoretically possible to know as much about your consumers as they know about themselves: to be able to anticipate their every thought and desire and be there with an appropriate product or response.  It is a world of ultimate targeting and profiling Continue reading

Creating ‘engaging content’ is a waste of time in social media

A provocative thought to start 2013.

Here is a statement that is incredibly important to understand if you wish to create an effective social media strategy.  I think it is possibly the most important concept you will ever need to get your head around to understand the future of marketing.  It is also pretty simple – one might even say it is obvious.  Here it is.

Traditional media is low engagement / high reach.  Social media, on the other hand, is low reach / high engagement.

That’s it.  It doesn’t feel like a revolutionary or startling claim – but grasping its full implications is something that very few brands have done.  I don’t see much evidence that P&G has grasped these implications.  I don’t see any evidence that Coca Cola has grasped these implications.  In fact I see plenty of evidence these organisations are either trying to give reach to their social media presence (in order to make low engagement activities and content still work) while failing to produce activities sufficiently engaging to be cost-effective in a low reach (i.e. social) environment.

To understand this we need to examine, in detail, the concepts of engagement (which is largely a function of content, information or activity) and reach (which is largely a concept of scale).

So let’s look at engagement (and content)

Most social media strategies are littered with the word ‘engagement’ and ‘content’ and then the ever-popular hybrid ‘engaging content’ which is frequently held aloft as the the all-consuming objective of social media campaigns (“Our aim is to produce the world’s most engaging content” – Jonathan Mildenhall, Creative Guru of Coca Cola in his famous Content 2020 video).  But here is the thing – to even use the term ‘engaging content’ in a social media context, is to demonstrate that you have failed to grasp the implications of the, supposedly simple and obvious statement at the start of this piece.

Here is why.

Content is a word that comes straight from the world of traditional media – the low engagement, high reach world of traditional media.  You can make your content more engaging, but you can hardly ever make any form of content engaging enough to work in the high engagement low reach world of social media.  Nor, conversely, will you be able to give your social media presence sufficient scale (reach) to make it work like traditional media – i.e. to be an effective channel to put single messages in front of your audience.

Ask yourself this question.  Where is it that your consumers have told you that what they really want from you is more ‘engaging content’?  Is this the overall thrust of the ‘posts by others’ section of your brand’s Facebook page?  If you seriously think this is what your consumers want, you have not been listening to them.  It may well be that you have worked out that if you create more engagement you will start to push the needle on the reach of your Facebook page – but so what?  Taking something that doesn’t actually reach many of your consumers and making it reach even 100%  more of them doesn’t really achieve much.  Twice of very little, is still very little.

As an aside, I have recently been having an interesting conversation with Socialbakers – one of the leading players in providing various forms of social media metrics / measurement. (See previous post.  Jan Rezab, the CEO of Socialbakers replied in an email and also a signed pdf letter (!) which he wanted me to publish.  Jan – consider that thus done, although I think the best way of replying would be to leave a comment on my blog so that everyone can see the whole discussion).  The basic thrust of our conversation is that Jan has been saying brands must create (and thus measure the creation of) more ‘engagement’ and become ‘friends’ with their consumers – and I have been saying that this definition of ‘engagement’ is not a concept worth pursuing or measuring, and that brands can never be friends with consumers – by any credibly social definition of friendship.

Engaging content is what marketing directors want their consumers to want (largely because it is something that marketing directors, and their agencies, believe they can produce).    It is high time we all paid attention to how it is that people are actually using social media (as opposed to how it is we might wish them to use social media).  They are not using it to follow brands or establish ‘relationships’ with brands – some of course are doing this, but they are – and will always remain – a tiny proportion of your consumer base.  What is mostly happening in social media is that people are using it to have conversations with people (real people) that they already know and are probably friends with.  This space is virtually impenetrable to brands – because consumers will never by ‘friends’ with brands (despite whatever label you might want to stick on a click).  Leastways, this ‘friendship’ (clickship) will be miles away in engagement terms, from the type of friendship they have will real friends.

It is all a question of the scale of measurement.  When you enter a social environment you have to use social scales of measurement.   Something that might look very engaging when viewed against traditional content-comparison scales of measurement, probably won’t even register on the dial, when you are using a social measurement scale.  Just because you are using social media, doesn’t mean that you are being social – although it does mean that you are being rated by a consumer (if not a measurement agency) against a social measurement scale – i.e. a scale where loyalty does not mean incentivised repeat purchase, loyalty means sticking by you through thick and thin.  In short – no matter what type of ‘engaging content’ a brand might create in social media, no matter how much more engaging this content or activity might be than an ad,  it is almost always going to be at the low engagement end of the spectrum – when that spectrum is calibrated against a genuinely social scale.

If we actually pay attention to what it is consumers are doing in social media (apart from connecting with friends) we see that they are asking questions and seeking out reliable, peer-endorsed, information.  This is an area where a brand can play, and it is an area where the engagement score of their activity can start to rate within a social measurement scale – as I will outline later.

But I am getting ahead of myself here.  Let us first look at the issue of reach, scale and media.

It is all about scale

The scale effect (i.e. business benefit) with traditional media was generated through its ability to reach large numbers of people – your entire audience – often repeatedly.  This allowed the contact value per person reached to be very small because a very large amount of a small thing still adds up to a large thing.  A great ad or campaign may make people a little bit more likely to buy your product – and if you can scale that effect across the whole audience that can translate into a big shift in overall sales.

Social media doesn’t do scale – it doesn’t have scale built into it in the way that traditional media does.  Facebook wasn’t designed as a platform to put a message in front of lots of people, it was designed to allow small groups of people to connect with each other.  Therefore, the scale effect (business benefit) from social media does not lie in the ability to create a small amount of a positive effect with a large number of people – because you will hardly ever be able to reach enough people to make this a sensible activity.  Instead, the scale effect comes from creating a dramatically greater positive effect per contact, albeit across a much smaller number of people (at any given time – see this post).    As we have seen ‘engaging content’ is never going to rank high enough to qualify as creating a sufficiently positive experience to make its production a worthwhile activity in the high engagement but low reach game of social media.

Note: you can’t solve the scale problem with social media by simply trying to add scale to your social media presence – boosting likes or followers – because it won’t be either cost efficient or possible to add sufficient scale for your social presence to start working for you the same way as traditional media does, i.e. as a channel to put a message in front of lots of people.  Reaching  half a million people using an ad is pretty easy, whereas reaching half a million people using Facebook is well nigh impossible.  This doesn’t, of course, stop people trying – hence our collective obsession with creating ‘viral content’.  Social media does, in fact become like traditional media when something goes viral and it does so a virtually zero cost – but you have to ask yourself the question: just how frequently does something become viral in comparison to the number of attempts to make things become viral.  Answer: hardly ever – and even when something does, the ‘engagement’ created is often of lower value than a conventional ad, because of the need to drag the content away from a proven brand message territory, in order to give it the interest necessary to create the viral effect.

Proponents of the engaging content school of thought, such as Jan from Socialbakers, may be keen to point out that more engagement leads to greater reach.   The big question is – how much reach?  Creating engaging Facebook posts will obviously increase the reach of your Facebook presence – but Facebook will never be an effective way of reaching your entire audience, or even a sufficient segment of it.  It goes back to my earlier post about what works for you in Facebook doesn’t mean that this should shape the way that Facebook works for you (it is a bit like the non-logic in the “all elephants are grey therefore all grey animals are elephants” argument).

In short, if you are going to do something that is fundamentally of low engagement (as measured on a social engagement scale) – you have to be able to do it at higher scale or reach than you are ever likely to achieve using social media.  If you are using a low reach form of media (such as social media) you have to be able to increase the value stakes considerably – way above that which we conventionally associate with ‘engaging Facebook posts’.

So how do you create a business benefit from engagement in social media?

Basically, there are two types of engagement:  the engagement brands want to have with their consumers and the engagement consumers want to have with brands – and both are totally different.  Brands want to try to talk to entire audiences (reach) and put messages or promotions in front of them.  This is what marketing basically does and the success of it is defined by the creativity of the message and the effectiveness of the channel strategy in distributing this message.  Consumers are happy with this (in the world of traditional media) because they understand that the brand is talking to them as part of an audience, not as an individual.  It is a bit like going to a Coldplay concert – this only really works if there is also an audience of which you are a part.  Standing in the arena on your own would be pretty strange.  However, when a consumer is engaging with a brand (in the world of social media) they are doing so as an individual and therefore the response they want back from a brand is totally different.  To return to the Coldplay analogy, if you had an audience with Coldplay, as distinct from being part of a Coldplay audience, you wouldn’t want Chris Martin to prance about and sing, you would want to ask him some questions and have a chat.  Understanding this difference between the world of the audience and the world of the individual, and the fact that consumers can operate seamlessly in both spaces, is the single most important step a brand needs to take if it is to understand how to deal with a consumer in the world of the individual (i.e. the world of social media).

So how does a brand create value by engaging with its consumers in the world of the individual?  It does it two ways.  The first is by listening to and answering consumers’ questions.  This is what consumers actually want a brand to be doing, rather than a brand that produces lots of ‘engaging content’ (Coldplay analogy again, you want Chris to talk to you, you don’t want him to prance around and sing).

Try this for an exercise.  Go to your brand’s Facebook page.  Look at ‘posts by others’.  See what it is your consumers are actually doing.  I can guarantee that 90 per cent of what will be going on here is consumers asking questions or registering complaints that they want attended to.   Then look at the total disconnect between how your brand is using Facebook to ‘reach-out’ to its consumers (lots of ‘engaging content’, probably produced by an agency) and how your consumers want to use Facebook to reach your brand.

In this respect Socialbakers are spot on when they talk about a socially devoted brand, insofar as the definition of a socially devoted brand is one that listens and answers questions (as distinct from one which produces ‘engaging content’).  Measuring your effectiveness in responding to Facebook questions (as Socialbakers do) is great, albeit the value you create for a business is not the speed of response to questions, it lies in the volume of questions you can answer and especially in creating an environment which encourages people to ask questions – what I call creating the expectation of listening.  Social media has created an explosion of opportunity in the customer service space.  This has been driven by the fact that customer service has become liberated from the channels in which it had previously been imprisoned (email and phone) – as I like to say, the social media revolution is simply the separation (or liberation) of information from its means of distribution.  Customer service has gone from being a business hygiene factor to being a front-line marketing tool (albeit most marketing directors haven’t embraced this fact yet).  Of course, there is also no point in then locking customer service back up again by imprisoning it in Facebook – a customer needs to be able to ask a question and receive an answer using whatever platform they want and thus brands need to be listening and responding, in real-time, across all platforms.

Coming back to the issue of scale and benefit – the value you can create from an effective customer service contact and the fact that this experience can now happen in open forums and is thus seen by many, is infinitely greater than that generated via a single impression created in conventional audience-based marketing.  Such a contact is high engagement and thus qualifies to operate in a low reach environment.  Create 1,000 such social contacts per day and you are creating something of real value whereas the creation of 1,000 low engagement, conventional content-based contacts is largely worthless.  This is in addition to the benefits that will also come from getting real-time feedback about what consumers think about your product.

Note: a like, follow or share does not qualify as a valuable social contact in this game because this is still in the low order of engagement – something that may be more valuable than an ad impression, but something that is nowhere near valuable enough to create a sensible benefit unless you can extend it across a large segment of your consumer base – which of course you will not be able to do.  Likes, follows and shares are also not useful indicators of a brands ability to respond to questions – they are indicators of what people think about content.  And content is not the name of the game in social media – content is the name of the game in traditional, high-reach media.   Listening and response is the name of the game in social media.

The second way you create value in the world of the individual is by identifying the tiny proportion of your consumer or customer base who are your super-fans.  These are not brand ambassadors, because they won’t want to represent your brand, nor will they be representative of your consumers.  There is also no point in trying to get them to increase their rate of consumption of your product or service because they are only a tiny group and are probably already at maximum rate of consumption.  However, what they will be prepared to do is become involved in your brand in areas such as new product development or customer service.  Prelini Udayan-Chiechi at Lithium has a fantastic case study from Logitech where they were able to quantify the huge value that super-fans, operating in a customer service community set up by Logitech (using the Lithium platform) were able to create.

But in all of this, it is essential to remember that we are always and only ever dealing with small numbers (low reach): a small number of super-fans or a small number of people – at any one time – who are asking questions.  If you are going to work at the small scale, you can’t create a business benefit simply by nudging those small numbers of people a little bit up the positive engagement scale, as is a realistic objective for ads and other forms high reach, audience-based, marketing.  You have to be doing something that operates at an altogether higher order of magnitude in terms of the value per contact, or else you are wasting your time.

In conclusion (finally)

So – to sum things up.  When you are in the social world, you have to use social scales of measurement and you have to create activities that will rank against this scale.  The activity that is the creation of ‘engaging content’ will never rank high enough (against a social scale of measurement) to make this a worthwhile activity.  You can create whatever scale you like to measure things like  ‘engagement’ and ‘reach’ and get tremendously excited because you have moved the needle by 20, 50 or 100 per cent.  But twice of sod-all, is still sod-all.

The only things worth doing, and thus measuring, are those activities which actually rank against a social measurement scale.  These activities are listening and responding to individual consumers (not trying to be their ‘friend’) and identifying those ‘super-fans’ who are prepared to actually  help you make your business better.

The value of a Facebook page does not lie in (and therefore should not be measured by) the ability to create engaging posts or reach lots of people.  The value of a Facebook page, as with all forms of social media, lies in the ability to listen and respond to those people who wish to engage with you.  It is the way your consumers use Facebook, not the way that a brand wishes to use it, that you should be measuring.  And, as I have said previously, this means that Facebook itself is a form of measurement, rather than something you should be measuring.

Good luck in 2013!

P.S Jan, if you want to respond, please leave a comment on the post rather than send me an email – in that way the conversation can become more visible – especially to those who have read the post.

– Richard Stacy: advanced social media training –

New HuffPost

Have just put a piece on Huffington Post.  It has a bearing on social media, but not exclusively so, so I didn’t also post it here.  It is about strategy, competition, customers and the likely failure of political ideologies that believe that the best way to reform public services is to make them ‘competitive’.  Check it out if you want to.