One key project has involved ‘classic’ social media: identifying our influencers, ranking them, and setting up mechanisms to monitor them. This just simply helps us to gain insights into the main industry issues, from the people who matter, and engage with them on a very human level.

The only stumbling block is: Twitter. Lists are great. But that’s just the ‘who’ part. To know what they’re saying, about a specific topic (ie mobile advertising) you need to be able to filter these lists. And that’s causing me headaches.

For example Hootsuite, while providing filters, does not do this persistently. When you add a filter, then select a different stream or tab, the filters disappear. Not good.

Tweetdeck used to have great filtering in the classic ‘Yellow’ version. But then it was revamped after being bought out by Twitter, and lost most of the features that made it useful in the process, including filtering.

So what is to be done? I’ve been running the old Tweetdeck as a backup solution, and it does a brilliant job. Every Twitter list, filtered for an extra smooth taste, gives me an instant overview of what our most influential Tweeters are saying about mobile advertising. It enables us to be informed across all our influencers, and agile in our response.

But I have a bad feeling. Come 5th March, Twitter will deprecate its old API, and at that point, I do wonder what’s going to happen with the old Tweetdeck. I expect it will just stop working, and I’m back to Hootsuite, or investigating more sophisticated – and expensive – tools that will do this very important job.

I know change is inevitable – George Harrison kind of said the same. But why on earth Twitter won’t enable filtering for lists, I do not know. Perhaps they think their servers will melt. Possibly they just want us to return to the ‘needle in a haystack’ approach of old. Or maybe – just maybe – someone somewhere will figure out a cool way to do this. And then charge us through the nose for it.

It’s been an, ummm, interesting three years plying my trade as a freelance social media bod. The first year I found my feet, and the income slowly and steadily rose, until at one point I was seriously considering taking on people to help me out. Then it suddenly all went downhill, and I found the work taking more out of me than it was putting in.

Curiously, since I made the decision to go back to permanent employment, things started picking up again. But I’d made my decision.

It’s not just the work, it’s the freelance life that started to pall. You tend to find that when you’re working, you’re not hunting, so a large spike in earnings one month becomes a drop the next, when you’re looking for work. And despite winning over 30 clients in the past three years – nearly one a month – I never really managed to arbitrate for that lumpy demand. And it’s lonely. And you tend to find you’re eating more biscuits than is strictly necessary.

Plus, whenever I visited clients in London, I realised how much I missed it. I used to think it would be great to be able to get on with work, without being disturbed by people, with a cat asleep next to the monitor and Radio 4 in the background. At first, it was. Then I realised I was talking to the cat, and it wasn’t even listening, even when it wasn’t sleeping. I missed the buzz of the city, and the stimulation of being around people.

And I also realised that freelance doesn’t lend itself well to truly strategic thinking. You’re regarded as a stopgap, and while you can kickstart programmes and train people, you don’t get to sink your teeth into something long-term. I really missed that. I think I’m more of a builder than a starter. Adfonic will give me the opportunity to build.

So a brave new world awaits. Adfonic is a very interesting global mobile advertising company that matches publishers and developers who want to monetise their wares, to advertisers who want maximum exposure. I’ll be producing  a ton of written material for them and looking after their social media presence and I just can’t wait. Strangely, it’s almost exactly what I did at Sharepages.com and its parent company KTS, except social media didn’t exist then. And when I look back, that’s the environment in which I felt I most belonged. I’m hoping the same happens at Adfonic.

My feelings about social media? Well, I’ve learned a lot over the past three years. I’ve learned that social media simply does not, cannot and should not stand alone. It absolutely needs to be complemented by other communications programmes including PR (‘earned’ exposure), advertising (‘paid’) and a company’s own efforts (its ‘owned’ channels). I’ve also learned that there’s a lot of variation in approaches to comms generally, from  ‘seat of the pants’ activity with little planning and lots of gut feeling, through to people who really do want to figure out replicable, objective ways of getting the most out of a programme through strategy. My money’s most definitely on the latter, but it seems most people can muddle through well enough.

I knew there was hype around social media. I do give credence to the Gartner Hype Cycle, and I think I’ve lived through the peak and the trough. We’re probably nearing the productive plateau. But I also think a lot of companies are now thinking “Well, we never did start that blog or YouTube channel or Facebook page, and we’re still here and doing ok”, and they’re right. But they probably could be doing better. Still, it’s not a wasted opportunity if you never took it, right? If you’re doing well enough, then that’s, well, enough.

So I’m looking forward to Monday. Today I visited the same bench, high up in the Chilterns, where I sat on the day I handed in my notice and decided to go freelance. Then, I sat for a while and wondered what on earth I’d done. This time, I sat for a while and thought about the ups and downs I’d been through over the past three years. The view, I’m sure you’ll agree, helps you get a good perspective.

As for my subscribers, well, I’m not really sure what’s going to happen with this blog. I’ve been toying with the idea of taking the Netvibes Pro option, setting up a dashboard under the brendancooper.com domain, and using that more to curate content, including whatever I’ll decide to write about, alongside other snippets I pick up along the way. Or I might start writing about my Triumph Spitfire or Concorde the Tortoise. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I’d like to thank the following clients for their help over the past three years: Abacus Marketing, Brightpath Technology, Consolidated PR, Edelman, Flashlight Marketing, Fleishman Hillard, Ideas4All, Jason Deign Associates, Kwittken London, License to PR, Maillot Jaune, Metrica, Neesham PR, Noble Meleka, Nobull Communications, PointBeyond, Ranieri Communications, Synesis Digital, Social Media Academy, and Superior Catering.

Onward and upward!

So I was playing around with dashboards and the like yesterday  – as one does – and noticed that BlogPulse has disappeared. BlogPulse was not the greatest blog search engine around, but it was the only one offering anything like useable charts. So, given that Technorati charts disappeared years ago (although they still have a page claiming they’ll be back soon), and other solutions such as IceRocket don’t enable you to pass keywords to create live charts, it would appear there is no longer any blog charting widget out there.

Is this the final nail in the coffin of blogging? Are we really so uninterested in blogging activity that charts are no longer considered viable? It would seem that way, and the ‘blogging is dead’ meme is very much alive right now.

Charting generally seems to be suffering

Recently, tweetcloud.com disappeared, without even a whimper. It just vanished. I seemed to be the only person who noticed, but tweetcloud.com was, like BlogPulse, the only solution that did something incredibly useful: it would create a tweetcloud for a search term on the fly. In other words, you typed in what you were looking for, and it created a tweetcloud for that search (not a tweetcloud of your own timeline, which really isn’t that much use but I suspect a lot less processor-intensive). Plus it did it quickly, and there was a widget for it, which enabled you to build dashboards giving an instant overview of the latest terms associated with any topic. It was great. And then it wasn’t. There are sort-of alternatives still such as Visible Tweets, Cloud.li and Twendz, but, while they’re very pretty, you can’t build them into dashboards.

And today, Trendistic, the only (again) solution for live charting of Twitter trends, is down. It was down yesterday too. Look for it on Twitter search and there are just a load of weird Polish references to it (who knows, maybe Trendistic is a Polish pop group). Surely – sssssurely – Trendistic can’t have disappeared too? And surely, again, it can’t just be me who thought it was an absolutely brilliant idea?

RSS is dying

If you’re detecting a pattern here, you’re not alone. It does seem that really great ideas are failing as the web grows bigger and faster. They just cannot keep up, it seems – or, at least, not until/unless they’re snapped up by one of the walled gardens such as Facebook. Free information – as in, really free, readily available, easily manipulated and shared across the entire web – is disappearing.

RSS was supposed to be the great hope of free information. Peel the content away from the format, and hey presto, you can share pretty much anything across any platform. But therein lies the problem: something free is not something you can fence off and charge for. It is free in every sense of the word.

So it seems RSS is suffering too. Google Reader used to be a really nice way to bring feeds together and create a static web page of the results as well as a newly aggregated feed. Not since its recent revamp however. All the sharing features have been ported across to Google+, presumably because Google+ is a neat, walled garden whereas RSS was messy and free. Yahoo Pipes was the ultimate RSS aggregator/mash-up tool but suffered from underinvestment by Yahoo. Even after a supposed major overhaul, it’s flaky and too slow to power a dashboard (unless you’re prepared to wait for a minute or so while the results load up). Another RSS mashup tool, XFruits, died a couple of years back. Do a search for RSS aggregator tools and it’s like a graveyard. The only viable tool that I can see is called FeedRinse which, while it offers aggregation and filtering (the two most useful features of Pipes), also feels a bit overloaded and slow. And, as with TweetCloud and BlogPulse, it’s the only game in town, which leads me to believe it won’t be for much longer.

RSS from search has been abandoned by major players too. Such as the bookmarking platform Delicious. You used to be able to search across the Delicious database and pull an RSS feed from that. Stunningly useful, as it showed you what other people considered important for any topic. Not any longer. Twitter has also demoted RSS from search: you can still do it, but you have to look around to find out how. It’s another candidate for the cull, I believe.

Mash-ups are harder

So where does this leave us if we want to create our own mash-ups or dashboards? Well we can dive into the APIs if we fancy it, and learn a smattering of HTML and javascript. But we still need reliable platforms to base our dashboards on. The familiar theme of ‘only game in town’ is revisited here, in that the only solution offering public dashboards – that is, pages that you can show to anyone without them needing to log in – is Netvibes. And every time I create a dashboard in Netvibes, I find I have to spend quite some time figuring out what works still and what doesn’t. Quite apart from discovering over the past few months that third-party sites have disappeared, I’m finding that third-party widgets in Netvibes are broken, or even that Netvibes itself is cranky. So for example, my attempts to create a dashboard yesterday were frustrated by HTML widgets only displaying the top portions of any image or javascript output, widgets generally not staying in the same place when I refreshed the page, RSS feeds not being imported correctly, and on recourse to their support forum, finding it full of spam.

It seems the free tools that were once so useful are now decaying or falling apart. I don’t know what ‘Web 2.0′ really meant, but I have a sense of something dying, something that was slower and smaller than the web today, that shared more freely but was doing so with less immediacy and monetary return. Whatever we’re moving towards, if it’s Web 3.0, then it’s becoming more consolidated, monetised, bigger, faster, noisier.

So the ‘roll your own’ approach is going to get harder. The smaller, innovative sites that did one thing, and one thing well, just cannot survive the double onslaught of vastly increased traffic and expectations of real-time delivery unless they can make money from  it.  The old, fluid, free web that comprised many islands of activity is solidifying into separate continents of influence. The game is so much harder now, that it’s only the really big players that can make sense – and money – out of it.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

Me? I preferred the more innovative, dynamic environment. I liked the way that RSS could be readily shared, and smaller enterprises could create neat tools that let you do things with it, without really needing to be a developer. I guess those days are gone. Nostalgia certainly ain’t what it used to be.

Postscript: … and no sooner do I file this post then I read this Observer piece by John Naughton, entitled “Has the Internet run out of ideas already?”, on the progression of information technologies: “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. In fact, I didn’t.

No valuable insights or deep analysis today. Just a cartoon that someone sent me. I can see that I’m going to use the phrase “I can’t get past the ridiculousness of it all” quite often from now on…

“Friends Reunited has relaunched?” thought I. Fortunately I managed to pull enough from my dusty memory banks sufficiently quickly to convince the assistant producer I was their man.

Two days later and I was outside Broadcasting House, having fairly thoroughly researched the topic. That was fortunate, because the questions they asked me – live, on air, in front of millions of listeners – weren’t actually the questions they told me they were going to ask.

I knew all about its history (set up by Julie and Steve Pankhurst in 2000, 3,000 users after one year, 2.5 million after two, 15 million by 2005 then sold to ITV for blah blah blah). I’d even figured out why some networks succeed and others fail (combination of luck and basically just being better), and why some major acquisitions hadn’t worked out (mostly the same reasons). This is because the assistant producer told me that’s what they were going to ask me.

Imagine, then, my surprise when Julian Worricker turned to me and asked my opinion of the site having played around with it. Fortunately, I had played around with it, for about an hour, without actually getting anywhere with it. Unfortunately, I had to be frank and say so, sitting right next to Chris van der Kuyl, CEO of BrightSolid, the company behind the Friends Reunited relaunch. He didn’t seem to mind: he was very well media trained and put up a good fight, I thought. For what it’s worth I thought he was an extremely nice chap and we had a very good chat before the programme.

Julian also asked my take on the name. Again, I wasn’t entirely positive. But I tried to get some conciliatory stuff in, such as Friends Reunited’s brand recognition and the way that focusing on nostalgia is potentially effective (although, I fear, in reality, not very).

Anyway, you can listen to the clip here. I’m probably not supposed to host it but heck, I pay my license fee and if the BBC wants me to take it down, I will. I was frankly surprised when a BBC radio journo friend of mine asked whether they were going to taxi me in. “No”, I replied, “But I’m interested to find out that’s the kind of thing my license fee is paying for.”

If they do use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, then I will graciously crack, in which case you can (at the time of writing) listen to the programme here.

So, I’ve had my fifteen minutes of fame. I just wish it hadn’t started with me coughing and saying ‘Excuse me’. How terribly British of me.

And I’m 7th on the list. Sorry, 8th. Sorry, 9th already. They’re popping out of the woodwork as I type.

A quick backstory to the Ad Age Power150 (as far as my memory serves). It was originally Todd Andrlik‘s Power150, which I came across quite a while ago and thought it was a neat way to ‘measure’ blogs. Take of the publicly available metrics such as Technorati Authority (remember that?), normalise them out of ten, add them up, and you get a list of influencers. So I took that, applied it to the list of 100 PR bloggers that I followed at the time, and created my own list.

Naturally Todd wasn’t too happy that I’d copied his idea, so I put an attribution at the bottom, and in later versions of what became the PR Friendly Index I adapted a more graphical approach (that would appear to be broken on this new template), without normalising, which gave me something of a USP.

Along the way Sally Whittle also asked me for some help with her top secret project, which begat the Tots 100, and Jonny Bentwood also started his list of analysts along similar lines.

The PR Friendly Index got me a lot of attention and in fact I’d say it’s the main reason I appear on lists nowadays. Many people linked to me, not least because I provided little badges for them complete with code that included the links. But it just became too tedious to maintain – which, in a neat circular kind of way, is what Todd found, which is why he gave it, or sold it (I know not which) to Ad Age.

So it’s probably fitting that it all comes back to Ad Age, which is where the Gorkana list comes from (actually it’s a list from 10 Yetis, but Gorkana are shouting and pointing at it, as if it’s news which, just to be clear, it is not).

However, Ad Age really is just bean counting. Which brings me to the title of this post: I’m not influential. Look, Drew Benvie is below me. Drew is UK MD of the group that includes Hotwire, Skywrite and 33 Digital. Steve Waddington co-runs Speed, which I visited the other week. Metrica is an entire company of measurement professionals (whose competition entries I wrote two years back so I know them quite well too). These people are all much more influential than I am. It just happens to be that I got more scores via various metrics once upon a time because I had some good ideas occasionally. Honestly.

So I really wouldn’t go by the figures. I don’t really think Andy Barr, head of 10 Yetis, has had a very inspirational idea in peeling out the UK PR people from the Ad Age Power150 (it’s been done before). I’d find out who these people are first, and then take a punt.

Over the past year or so I’ve become fairly convinced that measurement through solid, universal frameworks of understanding is the key to success. However, often what I find is that clients either don’t really care about it, or that, if they do, they only really care about the ‘good’ metrics such as ‘Friends of friends’ in Facebook, which is akin to the alchemy of AVE.

The Conversion funnel is as good a place as any to start. Believe me, I’ve presented this to entire roomfuls of so-called marketing types who have never heard of it which frankly astonishes me (and did astonish me at the time – I really did have to stop my jaw from dropping). It’s been around for a long time, it’s simple, and, I believe, it works. Just take each segment of the funnel and figure out what you’re trying to achieve with it, and from that figure out how you’re going to measure what you’re trying to achieve, to see if you’re achieving it.

I’ve used AIDA in the past, which may be a bit simplistic because it doesn’t take into account repurchase. I’ve used a much more complicated version of the funnel which left people looking mystified. But this one is the Goldilocks funnel, I think. It’s just right.

And, praise be, the entire blog post is pretty good. I’m not sure it quite manages to bridge the gap between online activity and conversion (ie “Did we manage to sell stuff?”) but that’s something we’re all trying to do, and it probably falls into the space between your website and your ecommerce platform. Right?

Anyway, as I always do when I ‘repurpose’ (ie steal) other people’s content, don’t just sit here reading this, go over to SEOMoz and check out the full piece. I like.