Social Media – length isn’t the issue

Posted on by April 26, 2013

Social Media – how long should you spend on it?

I’ve just read a comment (by someone who will remain nameless) stating that if social media isn’t yielding results, you’re not spending enough time on it. What arrant nonsense. If you follow that way of thinking through to its logical conclusion (and I don’t think that logic has much to do with the original daft comment), if you’re spending a couple of hours a day using social media ineffectively, you could end up wasting your entire day using it ineffectively if the simple answer was to spend more time on it. What tosh.

The two vital questions

The answer to the question ‘how much time should I spend on social media?’ is another question, two in fact – what do you want to achieve with it, and how will you know when it’s working? These are always my first questions when working with a client to compile a social media strategy (more about our social media services here).

An hour spent aimlessly noodling about on Twitter or idly browsing Facebook posts is pretty much wasted time you’ll never get back to develop your company. Half an hour spent communicating with clients or suppliers on Twitter, listening to the hot topics in your sector and running focussed searches (Twitter is excellent for these too), uploading a how-to video to YouTube and contributing something helpful to a thread on LinkedIn will be time far better invested.

There’s a danger in the ‘spend more time on it’ attitude that social media is being viewed as an end in itself. If you spend additional hours trying to ‘get it right’ on LinkedIn, Twitter or Google+, who’s looking after your customers and answering the phones? Is time spent on social media driving more customers to you, or just a bit of fun? Fun on social media is allowed, really it is, it’s okay, but as a plank of your business marketing a close eye must be kept on ROI.

So what it boils down to is it’s not how long it is, it’s what you do with it. Twas always thus.

Charity of the Year – Time to Vote

Posted on by May 22, 2013
Photo used under Creative Commons from Theresa Thompson Charity of the Year

Photo used under Creative Commons from Theresa Thompson

Charity of the Year: It’s that time again. Please vote to select our new charity of the year for 2013.

We’ve very much enjoyed supporting Concern Universal in 2012, but the time has come to share the love a little wider and find a new organisation to support in 2013. We’ll continue to promote CU and enjoy seeing them benefit from their fantastic GreenTree GAMEON win. It’s time to vote for a new charity of the year.

There are five contenders for 2013. Find out who they are, and who’s in the lead by a mile as I write, on our voting page. And why not have a look at the Hereford Times article? One charity has been hot as mustard at getting on the campaign trail – good luck to them and all the others in the running. Vote vote vote!

Open Source software: Munich 1, Freiburg 0

Posted on by January 8, 2014

Munich has intelligently saved 10m Euros by switching from Microsoft Office to Open Office. By contrast, another German city, Freiburg, has at last abandoned attempts to migrate to Open Office after a long and painful process. Is open source software the problem? Hardly. It’s all about handling change. 

Much has been written about this – here, here and here (that last by Glyn Moody – a must-read), for instance, but what it comes down to, essentially, is grasping the magnitude of what’s involved in making such a change, and a willingness to see that process through. What’s more, Munich is offering to share its experiences with and extend support to any other public administrations looking to switch to open source.

A tale of two completely opposite approaches to significant change

The contrasts could not be greater. Munich recognised that migration from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice would require a realistic strategy and technical expertise – the salient phrase here being “ongoing and not an overnight switch“. One aspect of this was the creation of the LiMux project (there’s a very long and detailed by hugely informative article about LiMux on the European Commission website). The deputy head of LiMux, Florian Schießl, admits that the process took far longer and proved to be more complex than had originally been envisaged, but this was tackled through creation of a new strategy and a refusal to remain what Schießl calls “a happy slave”.

The city council decided at the same time to comprehensively reorganise its entire computer infrastructure in line with LiMux’ “Quality over time” motto…Converting all computers to the Open Document Format (ODF) standard has overcome dependency on a single office software suite.

Contrast this with the experience in Freiburg. To quote h-online,

In Freiburg, by contrast, after years of torment, the OpenOffice migration project has now been abandoned and the council is reverting to Microsoft Office. A switch from Windows to Linux in Freiburg was never even tried.

The article describes Munich’s approach thus:

The tangle of existing IT structures was tamed

but Freiburg’s thus:

problems were simply not resolved. Staff were expected to muddle through.

Open source software: a red herring?

Whether we’re talking new open source software or indeed any systems for IT, clocking in or the sandwich trolley, how can such an approach ever have stood a chance? There’s little more to say about Freiburg’s experience really, but h-online can sum up for us:

If there’s a lesson in all this it’s that migrating a core software tool such as an office suite doesn’t work if it’s done half-heartedly. It requires careful planning and has wide-ranging consequences and that means an initial capital cost. In addition, a project of this kind needs to get both users and the IT department on board – in Freiburg it appears to have failed on both counts.