Attended my first ever Webstock conference at the Wellington Town Hall last week. It’s a collection of internet celebs & cool dudes talking about things they’ve done and places they think internet and our lives online are going to go. About 20 of us from Xero attended the 2-day conference – all decked out in our Xero gear (which didn’t go unnoticed!)
Half of us went on to the ONYAs Awards (as in ‘Good On Ya’) on Friday night to recognise stars in the online world. Xero picked up 3 of the 4 awards we were nominated for which was great and The Mister had to go up to accept one of them. I did a quick write up with some photos and a video of an amazing digital light-show that used the Town Hall pipe organ as its centre piece on the Xero blog.
Following are some notes I took during the 2 days so you can stop reading now if you want to, no more pictures, just notes to self really!
So you’ll have noticed by now that I have got all my photos uploaded to Flickr – well, all photos since May 2009 when I lost access to my original hand-made photo website that lived at orangethings.com for the last 10 or so years. However, as an archive, I’ve kept the site as it was online at orangethings.com/archive if you want to look at photos as far back as October 2005.
A random sample of my Flickr photos is shown over on the right of my blog and you can click on a photo, or the ‘View all’ link to go to Flickr.
So, for Flickr newbies, some things you might like to know:
The main ‘home’ page for a Flickr account is referred to as a photostream i.e. the constant stream of photos, and the main stream is sorted from most recent photo uploaded backwards. My photostream is flickr.com/orangegirlnz so you can bookmark that if you like.
Photos are organised by ‘collections’ (like albums I guess) and within that ’sets’ – in my case my collections are very high level i.e. Family and Travel for now and perhaps 1 or 2 more eventually if I end up with sets that don’t seem to belong, and my sets are generally time-based by months because that’s how we’re all used to me presenting my photos and in travel the sets are by trip.
Your choices for browsing the photos are by reverse order by just clicking through the photostream, or by a particular set by choosing the set you want (e.g. January 2010) from the right-hand side on the first page of the photostream.
Once in a set you can choose to view a particular photo by clicking on the little thumbnail version of it, or use the ‘Detail’ link under the title of the set to see them all in a medium size. You can click again into a photo to make it even larger and see information about the photo e.g. date it was taken, tags (or categories) I’ve attached to it. To to leave a comment you have to have a Yahoo account.
From a large individual photo you can click on the ‘All sizes’ button under the photo title to get a range of other larger sizes, including one good for printing. For best print quality choose ‘Original’ and use the ‘Download original size’ link that displays above the photo.
You can always return to the first page of the photostream by clicking on the orange graphic or link that says ‘orangegirlnz’.
From the photostream you can use the options under the title ‘orangegirlnz’s photostream’ to explore the photos by collection, by set or by tag. Tags are quite fun – every photo I’ve uploaded I’ve tagged with a topic like place names, people names, activities, food etc so by choosing a tag you can see all photos belonging to that topic.
Remember, Flickr is an online service that millions of people use to upload their photos to so in your clicking around you may end up back in the general Flickr site – just get back to my photostream using my link flickr.com/orangegirlnz – the search box on the homepage of flickr.com is to search for photos, not people.
In December I went to a lunch held by the NZ Marketing Association where 3 twitterers spoke about their experiences using Twitter as a marketing tool, peppered with their advice on how to use it. I think the audience were generally intrigued by Twitter and judging by some of the questions I was asked before the speeches started when people at my table heard I ran a corporate Twitter account, were there to hear about how to use Twitter in business.
I wrote down some of my thoughts at the time (was very pleased to see that I already thought/did most of this stuff myself esp with regards to the Xero account) and have meant to record them here since then – great holiday job to get done! As I’ve just using our Xero Twitter account based on my own ‘rules’ I’m still in a phase of being totally paranoid that I’m doing/saying the wrong thing and in sponge mode when it comes to seeing how others are approaching it.
Speakers were: Anthony Gardiner (Web Content Admin, NZ Army), Andy Blood (Exec Creative Director TBWA) and Duncan Blair (Brand & Comms Manager, Orcon).
Not just teenagers & young techies – actually biggest age-group seems to be 30’s
Generally people who already blog were the early tweeters
Judging by the level of whinging you can see on Twitter people either expect that their relative anonymity makes them comfortable doing this or that the immediacy of tweets means that someone will see it and do something about it
General feeling is that if you want Twitter to build an audience or create a community for your company you should use it for conversation and value, not brand blasting
Twitter needs a human voice if you’re to building any kind of audience – audience=trust+reputation so it’s no good getting an agency to tweet on your behalf or use any kind of animated response – the one exception to this might be to announce blog posts depending on how prolific your blog is. And how do you get the reputation and trust – be relevant, be interesting, be honest, be there.
A lot of large companies are using it to build brand and sometimes by the obsequiousness of their tweets and give aways I sometimes wonder if it’s to save brand face more. In that regard, it does give you a quick way to change people’s perceptions which can be pretty powerful on a one-to-one level when word of mouth is still a huge factor in brand choice
All feedback your company gets needs to be acknowledged without getting into the teen-phone-trap of who hangs up first, you don’t always have to have the last word and you don’t always have to comment back and say ‘thanks for tweeting about me’ etc so you need to develop that knack of knowing when to leave it alone, when to take it to email, when to admit you’re wrong
Occasionally it’s OK to tweet inane observations, if this goes towards showing your personality, and people on Twitter are used to a sea of this
Be honest & transparent (that’ my already famous orange presentation slide!) – whatever the principles of good customer service are you can’t beat old fashioned product knowledge and honesty, even it this means you’ll find someone else to help or you don’t know. And you definitely need to have a tough skin to deal with bad feedback and criticism (and having said that I’m not sure why I’m in this job HA! although it’s amazing the acceptance/forgiveness when you find the right way to agree/commiserate without putting down your own product)
Twitter is not a fad – everything is moving online and there are growth stats for Twitter that suggest it will be around for a while, perhaps not in it’s current form but as part of some larger converged online service
Twitter doesn’t have to have one objective or be used for one stream – if your brand or you are included in conversations or have questions directed at you on any topic, then that’s where you’ll go. This might take the form of general Q&A, sharing useful information for value-add or building personality, informal market research, entry of your brand into a competitor’s space and sometimes promotion
In an age of satisfy-me-now it’s not surprising that modern attention spans mean that 75% of people that rushed to get a Twitter account have tweeted less than 10 times, and without the staying power of building an audience and interest have an average 42 followers
And lastly … there is a difference between Facebook and Twitter – Facebook is a stream from your life (what you are doing/eating/wearing/feeling) and Twitter from your mind (what you are thinking/working on/delivering/researching) <– haven’t quite figured out how to explain what I mean here very eloquently, trapped in my head somewhere!
Interesting to note that no-one was ‘live-tweeting’ the presentation meaning that everyone was there to find out what it was – at Wordcamp (blog conference) I went to earlier in the year there was a constant tickertickerticker of laptop and cellphone keys as people tweeted snippets constantly as presenters were talking; sometimes verbatim, sometimes their own interpretation
So I survived my first ever presentation at NZX to the Australian Investor Relations Association conference on 12 November. The presentation was ‘Xero & Social Media’. I was totally petrified and worried that what I had to share wasn’t rocket science or anything particularly educational for a group of CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and comms/marketing people but it seemed to go down well. In the end it was a small case study (only had to survive at the podium for 10 mins!) on how we use a blog and Twitter at Xero to communicate with our customers.
I featured on the NZX blog pretty much straight away! And eventually got a recording of the presentation to go with a write-up on Xero’s blog.
Here’s the presentation below (click the big ‘play’ arrow to watch it now directly on your computer) or if you have an iPod or dodgey internet connection or speed you can download this version of it (17.7MB)*.
*Right click on that link, save to your computer; then find where you saved it and double click to open. Please note if watching this version on your computer (if you have the right software (if you don’t it won’t play)) that it is designed for a small iPod screen so it will be quite small to look at.
Really irks me when product writers put those of us who are damn good at our jobs to shame. Or perhaps in this case there was no product writer, that they thought their users would ‘just figure it out’ or they left the writing of instructions in the geeks hands … don’t get me wrong, geeks are brilliant, it’s amazing what they can do, but they and the people that employ them need to realise that there are just some things they’re not good at. And that that’s OK.
It’s just a small thing, and yes I did figure out what to do, but I ALWAYS notice stuff like this and get annoyed by it:
Aaaaaaand we’re back! Blog now brought to you by WordPress. Didn’t The Mister do well? Obviously looks a bit different and loads of things behind the scenes to make management better for me. For you, hopefully still much the same and all my old content, blog pics and categories are in tact. Mothers, making a comment should be easier – at the moment there’s no need for the secret code thing however if I get unsolicited comments we may have to put it back. At minimum, complete just your name and leave your comment. I think those of you that have a feed will have to use the RSS button on the right somewhere to get a new one.
For the moment the family website is gone and orangethings.com and orangethings.com/blog both go to the same place. All the family photos will come back eventually and as I don’t really want those public I’ll send a link when I know what’s going on.
Some time in the next week it’s highly likely that the Orange Blog and website will go offline as due to circumstances beyond my control involving the physical relocation of a server all my data and photos have to be moved somewhere else. Yikes!
But rest assured we are in the capable hands of The Mister and even though when everything turns back on it will undoubtedly look very different, he assures me that it will still be living at the same URL (web address). Bad news for the throngs of followers using the RSS feed, there’ll probably be a new feed URL … will let you know!
For daily addicts, if you’re following me on Twitter (twitter.com/orangegirlnz) you might get some warning.
– Over & out.
Bye bye Das Blog (yes, am probably the last person on earth still using it).
Have to manage a few conversation threads at work now and so as to not get confused I found where to completely personalise my own Twitter account so that it looks totally different from the work one.
I have to say, that’s a LOT of orange! Hope it doesn’t scare people off!
Blog is another year older – that’s 5 years now I’ve been rambling away. Take a look at my first week of posts back in 2004. A rather tentative start. But in that lot of posts you’ll see the first Sunday visit to Nikau and the first rave about their date scones! God, that’s 5 years ago?
Will have to see if the Mister can extract again how many blog posts I’ve done since I started. People sometimes scoff at me because I don’t do Facebook – quite apart from the fact that they won’t let me be Orange Girl, I don’t need it, I have my lovely blog. Some time later: the Mister saved his ‘how many blog posts are there?’ script and can report that as of today, there are 1230! That’s a lot. And considering this time last year there were 868 I’ve been rather prolific this year!
