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Twitter has quickly become the must-have channel for conference back-chat. Reading what other people tweet during a speech provides an extra dimension as you get a sense of what the audience is thinking. And just like passing notes in class, it’s also a lot more fun than simply sitting and listening. (and empowering – remember that Facebook interview from SXSW’08?)

Twitter is also a great way to attend a conference without actually being there – just follow a conference hashtag (e.g. #smib09 or #figarodigital) and find out all the gossip and the key points from the comfort of your desk.

But watch out Twitter. Google Wave is going to take this digitally-enabled conference back-channel a step further.

At the recent Ecomm conference delegates were provided with Google Wave accounts. What resulted was a fantastic showcase of collaboration and crowd-sourcing. Sprinkeled with a good dose of integrated offline and online real-time social media.   <– way too many social media buzzwords.

Here’s what happened: an audience member would create a Google Wave and others in the audience would edit the wave during the presentation. The result would be a crowd-sourced write-up of the presentation: a transcript of key points and a record of audience comments.
Here’s an example:

1. Audience member starts a Wave

2. Others join and edit the wave as the speaker talks

3. By the end of the talk there are lots of people using the Wave (their photos are along the top) and the Wave became a complete record of the key points plus audience commnets below.

For this conference the organisers created a Wave directory so that you could find what was said in each presentation.

The organisers also added waves so that the audience could give feedabck about the conference in general and ideas for next year.

It’s worth pointing out that Twitter is still an early-adopter phenomenon, and Google Wave even more so. As a result, whilst I am a complete junkie for following conference tweets, I suspect it’s going to take a couple of years before this goes mainstream. But it will. And the impact on conference organisers and speakers is significant.

And just in case you are new to social media, make sure you check out the other excelent social media platform for conference notes: Slideshare. This is always the best place to find presentations from conferences.

Have you tried following conference tweets? Or waves? If so, have you found them useful? and will augmented reality will be the next major influence?

The last post of our guide to Getting Started in Social Media looked at measurements and how brands should be ruthless about ROI. This presentation from Oliver Blanchard is a great introduction to social media ROI and how you should conceive of it and then measure it. It’s also quite amusing in parts and so is Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks

For me the most insightful part of the presentation is the distinction between a non-financial ROI and a financial one. Blanchard’s model is that you get the non-financial ROI before you get measurable financial return. They are part of a continuum – your investment leads to something that will have a non-financial impact first and then a financial one. This is a model that really rings true in our experience of building online communities. Financial ROI can take time to achieve, but good planning and strategy should start to give you non-financial ROI relatively quickly. Brands often need to have this trajectory reinforced – just because you don’t have any hard financial return yet does not mean it isn’t just round the corner. It probably is if you persist with your efforts.

Hello, and welcome to my first post. Over the next few weeks I hope to bring an insight into the world of social media from a unique perspective, how to sell the proposition to an often sceptical and always value-conscious audience.

You may be selling social media as a social media agency to a client (‘outside-in’); or maybe internally within your organisation to a senior manager, stakeholder, or steering committee (‘inside-in’). Whichever your focus, the positioning is the same, and I will summarise a process that really works.

First, a bit about me, my last 20 years has been in IT sales. I started at IBM, achieving a top grade within IBM Sales School, and after 12 years in the company I progressed to sales management. My subsequent roles after leaving IBM (in telco, services, and web cms software) have remained in sales and/or sales management, and they have always been fascinating and rewarding. I have no doubt that the root cause of continued sales success has been the selling basics that I learned from IBM, at IBM Sales School. And it’s a bit like riding a bike, once learned you never forget how to do it.

A salesman is an often maligned role, with connotations of annoying double-glazing people that telephone or call your house at highly inappropriate times, but the truth is far more palatable. In fact, as you develop and hone your skills, you learn that the ‘consultative sale’ is the key to success. The consultative sell requires you to understand the client (note ‘client’ – not ‘customer’ – there is a distinction in relationship), such that your proposition matches his or her needs. Put yourself in their shoes. What (if anything!) do they need, and why? Get to know them and what makes them tick. What are their objections, and are they real or hiding something deeper? And once that is achieved, then you are not a threat to your client, but an ally and possibly even a friend (or, at the least, a ‘trusted advisor’).

I have been selling IT services and solutions for over 20 years, and the fundamentals of success in social media selling are exactly the same as those that have driven me in my previous sales roles.

Over the next few posts, I’ll summarise some key techniques that work, and (more importantly) those to avoid to help you whether you are selling social media to clients or to your internal stakeholders.

Read all our posts on Selling social media here.

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in October.

1. Dannii, Danyl and instant X-Factor feedback

Dannii Minogue, a judge on UK reality TV show X-Factor, lost her mind for a minute live on air. She brought up a contestant’s sexuality when she was meant to be commenting on his performance. Twitter and the social web went wild. The speed of discussion and debate on Twitter, in forums and online communities was striking. This can be beneficial for brands when they are dealing with a potential reputation management issue. Good buzz tracking allows them to monitor social media, identify issues when they arise, understand the sentiment and where people are discussing it. Information is power, it helps brands make decisions about what to do and to do it quickly.

2. PhotoSketch or Sketch2Photo, it rocks

A great app developed by five Chinese students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore. t allows you to turn a simple drawing into a photo. There is clearly always a big jump between a video showcase and a working proposition, but it certainly looks good so far.

3. How brands can get started in social media: a guide

In October we have shared our thoughts on four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media. The aim is to give any brand who is looking to use social media (or indeed to use it better) a framework to work through, some ideas and also a lot of questions and decisions that will need to be made. As I say in a recent article in the Independent: “The biggest mistakes companies make, are implementing a tool-based, as opposed to people-based, strategy”.

4. Russian social network Vkontakte.ru plans global roll-out

Russian social network VKontakte (В контакте) serves 1.4 billion page views each day to its 42 million users, and attracts 14 million unique visitors each month. In one of the most engaged and fastest-growing social networking markets in the world, it is a force to be reckoned with. At the start of September, Vedomosti (Ведомости), the Russian business newspaper, reported that VKontakte had registered the domain www.vk.com and plans to begin marketing the social network in twelve new markets globally before the end of 2010. One to watch.

5. Getting started 1: Do you know what people are saying about you?

The first part of our guide for any brand getting started in social media looked at buzz tracking and social media monitoring. When brands are getting started in social media, they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to.

It would seem that this week Twitter has been releasing Lists to everybody. A lot has been written about this move and the differences it makes to Twitter and the way people will use it. For me, it makes a significant difference to the way users will use Twitter. It allows you to segment the people who are interested in on Twitter and group people who write about similar things or that you know for similar reasons or from similar places.

It will be interesting to see how the embedding and adoption of Twitter Lists will change the way that people are using it. Will people stop following people and follow lists instead? Will people share lists with friends and colleagues? How will lists be used to support events and discussions.

There are lots of questions, but from just 24 hours of using Twitter Lists I have some personal observations – three reasons why they’re great and two areas where I’d love to see some improvement.

Three reasons Twitter Lists are great

1. They let me keep up with people who Tweet less often. I follow a lot of people on Twitter. Over the last couple of years I’ve slowly added the people I meet, people I respect and people I enjoy listening to and I now have quite a few of them. One of the problems with Twitter is that it lists the latest Tweets from all my friends in chronological order. Those people who don’t Tweet that often therefore get swallowed up by the mass of people who do it more often. I can put together a Twitter List of friends, for example. And now actually see what they say even if they only Tweet a couple of times a day or even less.
2. They let me group people who Tweet about similar things. One of the real benefits for me of Twitter is that I can follow people who are interested in similar things – people who run and work in Online Communities in London, for example. Twitter Lists allow me to create my own groups of people based on my own interests. I choose people that I think are similar and group them together. If I want to know what people working in online communities in London are thinking and saying, I now have a place to go to. Twitter Lists give the List creator significant control over what the list is for and who is on it. They are my lists that I can, if I choose, share with others.
3. They let me keep some groups of people private from others. There are lots of reasons I might want to group people together and follow them on Twitter. I’m interested in Client-Side Social Media People, for example, and have grouped them together for me and if anybody else want to follow that list too then that’s great. Other lists I want just for me. A group of friends from University, for example, who I want to follow but don’t necessarily want to advertise or share with the rest of the world. The list will mean nothing to them and I might not want to advertise this list to everybody who follows me on Twitter. That I can control which Lists are private and which are public for all to see gives me, as the List creator, even more control.

Two areas where Lists could be improved

1. Better search of my own ‘following’. Lists highlight a real problem with Twitter as a tool for organising people you follow. There is no real search just of people I follow in Twitter. I cannot find the people I follow who are in London, for example, or even everybody I follow called Matt. When I created my list of French Social Media People, for example, I knew that I already followed a whole bunch of people that I wanted to group together in this way. I just couldn’t find them easily. Even a simple search and filter function on the ‘Following’ page would have helped me to organise people more easily.
2. Allow me to make my List collaborative. There are currently two types of List that I can create: private ones (such as a list of people I work with) and public ones (such as my list of people who say things that make me think). I’d like a third level: collaborative Lists. Some of my public lists I’d love other people to add to. This would help me – I would find new people because others would add them to my list. It would also help to mitigate against a proliferation of Lists which contain the same core of people with a few different and new people that an individual knows. Giving the List creator the power to make some, but not all, of their Lists collaborative would still give them significant control over what they create. They could just allow other people to help them.