Fantasy Animals, Pets and Pretzels More Popular Than Businesses

Posted on February 14, 2010 by Michele Neylon

If you frequent the “twittersphere” or Facebook you’ll often come across businesses and their staff trying to market their products and services to you.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, how they actually do it is another matter entirely …

But how successful are most of their attempts to “tap in” to “social media” and “maximise” their “potential”?

You’d have to wonder at times, especially when you look at how few “fans” or “followers” some of them actually have.

Fantasy animals, however, manage to get a reasonably respectable following..

Common Unicorn, for example, has over 1400 followers on Twitter and is listed 50 times:

Twitter Unicorn

The unicorn is eclipsed by a Squirrel, however, who has managed to attract over 13.5k followers – being listed 660 times!

Twitter Squirrel

What about Facebook?

Facebook seems to be a great place to find oddly named “groups” for just about every possible “idea” under the sun, but a Danish pineapple has managed to get over 167k fans! Not to be outdone, Germany has a pretzel with over 379k !

And we shouldn’t forget that even cats, dogs and other pets are also finding a following on Facebook…

Why do I bring this up?

Well to start with it amused me, but also it puts things into perspective. A lot of people seem to be making a lot of money from businesses that want to “tap into” social media as part of their marketing. While there is nothing exactly “wrong” with that you’d have to wonder what kind of metrics they are using to sell their services to their clientele.

If a fruit or a pretzel can get huge following on Facebook without it actually selling anything to anyone, how well can a “normal” business expect to do?

What is a measurement of their “success”?

The reality is that there probably isn’t a simple way to “measure” success. There are a lot of different factors that come into play.

But I digress..

Maybe the real “takeaway” from these rather silly examples is that they all share one thing in common – fun. They’re all frivolous fun. People use and interact with social media sites in their spare time, as well as during office hours. If you look at the kind of links people share, the pictures they post etc., you quickly realise that they don’t go to “social media” to buy or to be “sold to” or “marketed to”.

If you can instill some level of “fun” into your “presence” maybe you’ll find that you are actually more successful, though getting the balance right might not be that as easy for a business as it is for a fantasy animal.

The Unicorns Know About Facebook Now Too (mattstratton.com)
Study: Only A Quarter Of UK Companies Market Their Brand On Twitter (thenextweb.com)

Christmas Is A Time For Sharing With Your REAL Friends

Posted on December 24, 2009 by Michele Neylon

Social media networks; Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace etc., etc.

How many of your “friends” are actual friends? How many of them actually care about YOU?

If you’re completely caught up in the “follower count race”, then you’ve probably already entered “social media hell”.

But.

There is light at the end of the tunnel

You can disconnect.

You can reconnect with real people. I know this may sound shocking, but you could try to actually interact with a real person for a change.

Forget about vampires, random farm animals, mafia members or fantasy beasts (Twitter is infested with unicorns.. )

Removing yourself from all the social network sites takes time, so some nice person has actually automated the process – the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine does it all for you

Here’s how it works:

WEB 2.0 Suicide Machine Promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

So there you are. You can save yourself from social media. You can get back your REAL life.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Posted on August 9, 2009 by Michele Neylon

Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or simply a blog people sometimes forget that their audience is fickle.

If you spend too much time and energy “planning” and making grandiose promises of “things to come” will anyone really care or notice?

With Facebook “pages” there is little to be gained from putting up a “holding page” – you can simply choose not to make your page public, so you can tweak settings and layout privately.

With Twitter, however, it’s not that evident. Granted, you could choose to “protect” your updates, but you wouldn’t be able to hide your profile page and if you plan on using Twitter for your business “protection” may seem odd.

There has been plenty written about what Twitter is and isn’t, but ultimately if you don’t actually use it nobody will either notice or care.

Of course, conversely speaking, if you used it badly people would notice and probably criticise you …

However if your business’ Twitter status is frozen with a “coming soon” style tweet, then maybe you’ve really misunderstood the medium completely. A blank account would probably seem saner.

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