Conscious Communications

For example.

Budgens Crouch End grows vegetables on its roof garden, which is great and lots of people love it!

Scenario1: You’re deciding who should handle the social media stream for your organisation, because you don’t think you know enough about it. Here’s what happens:

Let the IT department handle it – you get SEO specialists trying to automate tweets, because they can build a bot. Results – you wonder why no-one retweets.
Let your PR supplier handle it – they will say it’s a silly idea and you don’t need it at all, worrying about losing your account.
Let your sales department handle it – they will try to turn it into a marketing channel.
Let the intern handle it – heard of the Habitat intern debacle?
Let some bottom-rung marketing employee handle it – it will sound like a little marketing person.
You get a Social Media consultant in to solve this for you. It’s Russian Roulette – most social media consultants that are good at selling themselves are opportunists and don’t have the skills you need.
You hire a “digital agency” to handle your social media strategy.

Still going to let someone else do it? Your best bet, if you’re going to outsource it, is still to learn the basics. What you’re going to do with your £ several hundred K of Social Media budget after that is up to you!

A twitter channel is personal. You _want_ the most visionary person to run it. If this is your business, you want to ideally Speak For Yourself.

Speaking for yourself on Social Media. It’s not rocket science. Most importantly, it’s a habit. One of our courses teaches you some history, some lingo, some best practices, mostly it’s geared to form a new habit. Our courses are 6 – 12 weeks long, because that’s the time it takes to develop a habit.

Recorded on 4 Feb 2010 in London, Video by Debbie Davies

Everyone around us creates content all time. Smartphones take pictures and record video, and we all join in conversations online by leaving comments on news websites, blogs and online shops.

What’s happening in Social Media right now is that methods are being developed for making these conversations discoverable to the people they are relevant for. This can mean talking to fellow knitters about what you’re knitting and helping and inspiring each other, or, if you are a business, this can mean picking up conversations about your product and building a captive audience who are interested in you and what you are offering.

Think about it, how much more cost-effective can your communications be if you 1. speak for yourself and 2. speak to a willing audience? And ideally, 3. convert this willing audience into your advocates?

Every company who uses social media does it differently. All of us are taking part in shaping what it’s going to look like in the future. The power of social media is so big that practically all new mobile phones come with the ability to record media and access to some sort of social platforms – the biggest and most open one, twitter, can be accessed even by using sms.

Small and medium businesses are only just waking up to the fact that not only are they able to join in with these conversations, but are even very welcome to. In most places, an active local online community is forming, and for local businesses to join those discussions and talk about – and for – themselves is the logical next step.

You don’t even need to write much. A twitter update is anything less than 140 characters. A picture says 1000 words, and a video is made up of how many pictures? Imagine people creating their own entertainment and news channels by following exactly the content they are interested in, which might include a picture from the queue outside the local butcher on Christmas eve, or the latest beauty treatments available at their gym. Yes people are talking about you anyways, you might just as well join in.

This content is sometimes done on the fly and roughly edited, and sometimes more professionally produced. We can set you up with either. Create the content and assemble people to listen to you.

What’s happening with Social Media is nothing less than revolutionary.

We have entered a new age in regards to just about everything. Take part and make it your own.

Conscious to us means being aware of who you are, what you want, what you love, and what you want to achieve and what you need to achieve that. Sometimes we need to come out of the 9 – 5 mentality, and leave the disconnect of work/pub/home, to think about what’s at the heart of us. And then start communicating this.

We want to know. There might be somebody out there who can make it happen, you know?

We want to show how easy it is to speak for yourself. And to teach how to use the tools. They are all freely available, and lots of people are using them. Celebrities, organisations, charities, brands, your neighbour, your library, the Royal Family. But who cares about them? We want to hear from YOU.

Clay Shirky at TED Oxford, July 2009.

There are only four periods in the last 500 years where media has changed enough to qualify for the label Revolution. The first one is the famous one, the printing press. Movable type, oil-based inks, that whole complex of innovations that made printing possible and turned Europe upside-down, starting in the middle of the 1400s. Then a couple of hundred years ago there was innovation in two way communication. Conversational media, first the telegraph, then the telephone. Slow, text based conversations, then real-time voice based conversations. Then, about 150 years ago, there was a revolution in recorded media other than print. First photos, then recorded sound, then movies, all encoded onto physical objects. And finally about 100 years ago, the harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air, radio and television. This is the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century. This is what those of us of a certain age grew up with, and are used to.

Please watch the talk. It’s not too long.