Today’s Ginger Stepchild (apologies to gingers; us anglo-saxon mouse types are just jealous!) is Social Media Companies On Twitter.  And specifically, how far too many of them embody everything that’s wrong with social media (Twitter particularly) much of the time.

But first, a little backtrack. Before throwing any stones, let’s examine our own glass house.

How we use Twitter

Before saying anything about anyone else, it’s only fair to discuss the small matter of the @rosemcgrory Twitter account. This always makes for a fun and thought provoking discussion with our clients, who once in a while ask us in a training session something like “how much business do you get from twitter?”.

So, here are some facts about us on Twitter.

1) The account has to be there; it also has to be active, and have a respectable number of followers. That’s because sometimes,  it may influence the decision of potential clients who don’t yet know how to evaluate the use of social media in particular environments, about whether to contact us. That’s fine, of course we need to be “walking the talk” – even if the actual purpose of the account isn’t what they think it is.

2) In almost 6 years of business, we have got almost zero business directly from Twitter. The people who need our help are either not yet using Twitter actively, and / or do not choose it as a place to go when they’re looking to commission training or strategy services. Again, that’s fine; we get that, and one of the first things we’d urge any company whose primary driver for being on Twitter is “direct generation of leads” to do is have a long hard think about whether that’s realistic for their customers in their market.

Fortunately for us we know where our clients do go, and we have that covered (and no, we aren’t telling, sorry!). And we’ve worked with, and continue to work with, many clients for whom that isn’t the case, and they are able to see real ROI (in various forms, depending on their own objectives) from being active – so this isn’t really a moan about Twitter per se!

3) But….the quality of available content and discussion on Twitter in our particular industry segment is pretty much dreary on a good day. On a bad day, it’s will-to-live-sapping, depressing, enough to put you off of all forms of social media forever.

And it’s #3 that’s grinding my gears today.  Now because of Numbers 1 and 2 above, there’s the odd time where we do things that we might often advise our clients not to do. Repeating content a little too often, having longer than ideal gaps between activity, or being a little too self promoting. But we do try.  We try to always keep in mind that, in amongst those thousands of “need ’em but don’t read ’em” followers on our account, are folk that genuinely have an appetite for our blog articles and thoughts, and respect that accordingly. So that means not blowing up their timelines with endless self promotion, or low grade links to repetitive, poor quality or uninteresting content.

The same can’t be said for a depressingly large number of companies in the social media field. This morning I made one of my rare forays into “what’s going on on Twitter industry-wise”. I hoped to stumble over one or two new accounts to List (not follow; anyone who thinks we’re reading the tweets of our 2k+ followees is kidding themselves badly – and that goes for anyone who’s following more than a couple of hundred accounts. The Listed people get the love, and they’re almost always private lists!).

Here’s what I found. Just a little sample of the timelines of those accounts which come up on the first page when you search “social media” on Twitter (click if you need it a little larger to read!)

I’ve removed the account details because this isn’t about starting a war with any specific Twitter user. But, really? On one, endless self promotion. The second, pointless auto-generated spam that nobody in the whole of time ever cared to read. The third, carelessly put together content without any regard for the Twitter character limit (most likely auto posted to multiple platforms from third party software).

Of those, one account apparently belongs to a “Forbes Top 50 Digital Influencer”. Another has over 30,000 followers – presumably of the kind who never actually read their timelines. All were from a 2 minute perusal of the accounts that Twitter’s own algorithm thought worthy of putting on the first page for my search results – so there’s another issue, right there.

There are a few good accounts out there, but they’re mostly the superstar Mari Smiths and Jon Loomers, or companies like Mashable with colossal resources behind their accounts.  The mid tier of “OK” users has a high proportion of retweets from those accounts and a handful of others. There’s almost no originality or personality to be seen anywhere.

I know, most social media company Twitter accounts are just playing the game. Cranking out a load of content into an internet black hole, following back enough other accounts to bump up our numbers but without any intention of reading them.

But if we as social media professionals can’t show some appreciation of those “real” people we want to be reading our accounts, and maybe even throw in a bit of actual personality once in a while, how can we help our clients to? Used well, Twitter is a fantastic tool that opens up great possibilities. Used lazily and thoughtlessly, it becomes a merry-go-round of users doing almost anything but engaging meaningfully with anyone else. It’s time we all took a stand against that.

From a brand of this size, this is very significant, for a few reasons. Firstly, because they are acknowledging that misleading practices are widespread – and in our own experience, the beauty industry is at least as bad as any in this respect, maybe worse. Secondly, they are admitting that brands have a role in perpetuating that fraud, by creating the demand that “influencers” respond to.

From a marketing professional perspective, this is fantastic news. If more PRs and brand clients had been making educated decisions about who they pay for influence within the social media ecosystem, we would very likely not be having this discussion at all.

But here we are, and mainly because of the longstanding practice of setting influencer payscales mostly or entirely according to their number of followers, rather than, say, rewarding them with a proportion of any sales resulting from their work. As a consequence, it’s wise to regard any social media account with unaccountably large numbers of followers, or whose every banal uttering on Instagram is met with disproportionate enthusiasm, with great suspicion.

That has had a massive and toxic impact on the whole sector. Clients look at these (literally) unachievable numbers, apparently generated by doing nothing particularly clever or out of the ordinary, and they demand that marketers achieve the same thing for them. Potentially, marketers are put in a position of choosing whether to pay their own mortgages or stick doggedly to doing things the right way – which will pay dividends eventually, but often well after a client has lost patience.  Other social media users ( your would-be Influencers) have to choose between a lucrative push-button option to bulk buy followers, and the slow and arduous route of building a genuine following through creating great content.

Everything gets distorted by those “dishonest business practices” that Keith refers to.  I know we as a business will have lost potential clients in the past, because we don’t have an enormous Facebook following. The reason for that is that we have chosen not to invest in the resources required to build one honestly – ie, ongoing high quality content creation in the social media space. That takes time from good people, and those good people need to be paid, and those costs would have to accrue to the fees we charge our clients. We hope that our potential clients will look beyond those particular numbers, take time to chat with us and evaluate our expertise and approach in a more meaningful way – but there’s no doubt that somewhere along the line, some won’t have done. Is there a temptation to cheat the numbers? Of course there is!

The illusion of widespread but inexplicable popularity on social media itself spawns other scams. People who want it to work for them can’t see any explanation for others’ success, which makes them easy prey for practitioners who claim to have a “secret formula” that they can either teach or deploy at will – for a price.  The truth is, there is no secret formula, and success depends on the same basic factors that have been around since God was a boy – understanding your audience, having a great product, consistently generating good quality content that your audience enjoy, and ensuring that you take best advantage of the opportunities for visibility that each platform offers.  Quite often, this news is surprisingly unwelcome…

So where does this leave social media marketing? The thing is, that none of this changes the fundamental uniqueness of what social media marketing can do. There has never been a single, unified communication platform of the size of Facebook or Instagram, since time began. There are real opportunities for effective marketing and laser focused targeting that can’t be found anywhere else, and at a cost which is very hard to equal through other channels.

BUT

As marketers and as clients, we have to be satisfied with “just” those unparalleled opportunities. Stop trying to believe in the unicorns, and take the word “viral” out of your vocabulary (in most cases, at least).

Social Media and self esteem

Firstly, the article argues that using Twitter and Facebook is harmful to your self esteem and general mental health. We’ve written before about the phenomenon of social media boasting, and would agree that it’s not good for anyone – the reader or, ultimately, the writer.

Does it have to be that way, though? Of course not. In fact, social media offers any number of ways to positively improve your self image – either as an individual or as an organisation. Making contact with like minds has got to be the big one, but the ability to share your own creations, whether that be a blog article or a photograph on Flickr, with an appreciative audience is also enormously enriching –  and  just about impossible to achieve without social media.

This really isn’t about the intrinsic nature of social media, it’s about personal choices and how you use it. If your online social group spend a lot of time boasting about their lucky career breaks or genius children (or your partner company’s Twitter feed is jammed solid with nothing but new client wins and awards), and you’re sensitive to that, then you don’t need to switch off – but you do need to find a new social group which brings you more interesting and positive interactions.

Fight Club

Social media is, apparently, “a hotbed of bad behavior“. Uh, yes.  Anyone pop out to the supermarket, or get on the Underground lately?! Not exactly bastions of good manners either, are they…and neither is most of the public world. One of the great things about Twitter is that the relative anonymity allows people to be unusually honest and forthright. And one of the worst things about Twitter is…yes, exactly.

Cyber-arguments with strangers aren’t always futile, though; we’ve seen instances of people actually changing their minds about any number of important issues, philosophical or not, following “discussions” on line – although the reference to Godwin’s Law is all too often relevant. Ultimately, a simple “never read YouTube comments or any part of the Daily Mail website” rule will take care of the worst of it.

Within reason, a good online debate can have all kinds of positive results. It makes you think harder about what you do and why you do it. It helps you articulate your thinking in the simplest possible terms, which can have enormous knock-on benefits next time you need to explain something to a client. Kicking  social media into touch and retreating to a little bubble where nobody challenges you isn’t, in the end, going to be beneficial.

Offline is no substitute for online

“Real world” opportunities pass us by while we’re preoccupied with social media, says Ms Henderson. The evidence for this – that only a fraction of  job hunters attend offline networking events etc, but 70-80% of job vacancies are never posted. So, the online job seekers are wasting their time on the job sites. That last part may be true, but it’s a non sequiteur anyway, as the major issue is that large proportion of “under the radar” vacancies.

Social media gives you a much greater social reach than the “real world” ever can – there are only so many business events you can go to, only to find that there’s nobody there even remotely connected to your sector. Being well connected on social media gives you a much greater chance of getting to hear about those unadvertised jobs or great contracts.

Like any other way of communicating, everyone has to take responsibility for their choices and the way they use social media. We refer you once again to the old “Twitter is just full of people talking about their lunch” argument: it’s all what you make of it!

Most hashtags used on Twitter are pointless

So here’s the niggle: pollution of Twitter by stupid, unhelpful hashtag usage on a grand scale. It really has got to the point now where there are far more uses of hashtags which just general visual noise, than there are for any practical purpose.

Let’s start by considering how hashtags are generally explained to new Twitter users. Twitter’s own help page provides this definition:

Does this seem a fair enough description to you? Well…it almost works. Except when it doesn’t, which is most of the time.

Hashtags for “keywords or topics”

Think about it. If you’re using a “keyword or topic” in a Tweet, the word in question would typically be something that’s perfectly standard and very likely to be predictable by any Twitter user. For someone looking for tweets about Google Adwords, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that “Adwords” is your likely keyword.

So if you’re getting involved in a conversation about Adwords, what exactly does adding a hashtag in front every time you type #adwords, actually achieve? Honestly, nothing. Absolutely zip. You’re short cutting the search process very slightly for anyone who sees your outbound tweet, because they can click directly on the word to search for it. To my mind, that’s just not enough justification for #adding a #load of #visual #noise to your tweet.  It’s going to take anyone thinking “hmm, I’d like to see who else is saying what about Adwords” less than a second to just type “Adwords” into the Search box.

Twitter’s internal search algorithm doesn’t distinguish between a word with or without a hashtag when returning results (see below) and neither does it distinguish when reporting Trending Topics, so neither of these are a good excuse:

In other words, Twitter’s definition leads to users stuffing their tweets full of hashtags which are just shortcuts to obvious searches. Which is ugly, and a really poor use of the hashtag concept.

Here’s where the magic happens

Because here’s the thing: used properly, hashtags are fantastic. They have the power to bring people together who’d otherwise not have had a hope of finding one another, and enable real-time discussion in a way which doesn’t exist anywhere outside of Twitter.

Here are a couple of totally valid uses of hashtags, where their presence actually adds something to the tweet.

Firstly, to bring people together on a topic, often time-sensitive, where it’s not obvious what the appropriate search term should be.

A great example of this is the BBC topical comedy show Have I Got News For You. For years now, the hashtag #HIGNFY has been shown at the end of the opening credits, to enable a real-time discussion (OK, massive snark about the presenter’s tie, but still).

Without the hashtag being “declared” in that way, the likelihood of the whole audience arriving at it is miniscule;  people could be using all kinds of combinations of “haveigotnews”which means many who want to be involved in the conversation may end up missing one another.

The hashtag #PMQS for Prime Minister’s Question Time is another – again, people want to quickly see what’s being said on a transient topic, without having to set up multiple searches for all the ways in which it might be referred to.

Similarly with conferences or events; having an agreed hashtag lets attendees find one another and converse with each other or speakers, and those not attending keep up with what’s being said.

Second good use:  to indicate the topic of something where it might otherwise be unclear from the tweet, or discovered by a standard search (because the keyword’s not in the tweet). Going back to the Adwords example; “my company is very good at #Adwords” is a poor use of the hashtag, but “Here’s a fascinating guide to the evolution of internet advertising over the years [link] #Adwords” is helpful.

A final bonus good use: indicating to your followers when you’re taking part in a Twitter meme game – to save them the time spent wondering if you’ve lost your mind. You know the ones we mean – #updatedbooks  (“Bridget Jones’ Blog”) and so on.

Your turn – send this to the hashtag polluters in your timeline if you dare. And if there are any clever uses that we’ve missed, comment them up!

Where are we at with Social?

Well, things have definitely changed in the last six months or so.  One of the major trends we’re seeing is organisations (charities and medium-sized businesses especially) finding that “get to grips with Social Media” has finally found its way to the top of the “To Do” list, and many of them feel like they’re playing a big game of catchup.

We don’t think that, in actual fact, they are; while most organisations seem to be beyond the “I need a Facebook” stage now, there are many who are still taking baby steps with even the basics. Things like knowing who their audience is on a given platform, and putting out content which is appropriate and valuable to that audience in anything approaching a consistent way. Any organisation prepared to give serious thought to their social media strategy and execution can leapfrog over those who’ve been dabbling for a while, with relative ease.

The beginnings of a shift in tone

What is really interesting though, is the way that the potential of the social media environment is still coming out of the mists. There’s still massive misunderstanding about how social media works in large sections of the population, often flowing from the mainstream media.

[jbox title=”Diversion alert….”] My current favourite is collecting stories of people who’ve allegedly been burgled “because of Facebook”. Nope, they got burgled because either a) they don’t know how to work their privacy settings before announcing they’re off on holiday, b) they accept all and sundry as Friends, or c) – the most likely in my view – their friends are dodgy lowlifes who’d otherwise have found out they were away from someone in the pub, and burgled them anyway. None of this is Facebook’s fault, but the mainstream media just can’t resist).[/jbox]

That’s not the interesting part, though. Most of us, marketing managers included, are still coming to terms with the  implications of  informal, person-to-person interactions on a global, public scale – but we’re getting there.

Take last week’s reporting of the latest big brand hashtag hoohaa, the #waitrosereasons campaign. Waitrose kicked off a campaign asking customers why they shop there; predictably, the faction which makes Twitter so interesting responded by having some fun with Waitrose’s “upmarket” image. There were tweets involving unicorn feed and gold thread, and opening hours fitting around peasant-beating schedules.

Initially, the reports almost universally involved wailing and gnashing of teeth from marketers – even from many who are closely involved with the online world and should know better. But gradually, common sense returned and we started to see an alternative point of view being expressed. And rightly so.

Because here’s the thing: the way that campaign unfolded was completely appropriate for the social environment, and I’d be astonished if Waitrose’s marketing department hadn’t anticipated exactly that.

Yes, if someone had printed those comments in the Telegraph, it may have been a PR disaster. We have certain expectations of the broadsheet context, of seriousness and authority and a formal “brand personality” which is decided by the company itself.

In a social media environment, it really isn’t a disaster. It seems pretty unlikely to me that anyone out there was unaware of Waitrose’s “posh” reputation until they saw those tweets. The response from the Twitter community was playful and subversive. That’s how Twitter is.

I’m not in any way arguing that this was a genius campaign – it could definitely have been improved. Some wording which encouraged positive comment more than, to use a technical term, piss taking, would’ve been better. And the way that Waitrose responded was OK, but their social media team are no O2, that’s for sure. A little more in the way of personalised and humorous responses would have gone a long way. But hopefully, taking a little subversion in their stride is a sign that both brands and consumers are understanding the real differences of the social environment more and more.  I don’t think we’ve really seen yet what capitalising on that can do.

There’s a huge problem afflicting the digital marketing industry in the UK at the moment: clients. Not all clients, but a significant proportion of really poorly educated clients who are making buying decisions about where to put their digital marketing business.

These people don’t know what “good” looks like. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, we all have to start somewhere…but some people will do their level best to avoid finding out. They don’t want to question what they’re being told, or demand some logic behind what they’re being charged for. They want simple, “silver bullet” answers – ideally cheap ones.

Silver bullets only work on vampires – cos they don’t exist either

Here are a couple of quotes to illustrate what this looks like from behind my desk:

From a hi-tech firm based in Cambridge, who wanted a cost for “doing their social media” but refused to discuss details of their marketing strategy or target market:

“We’re going with a US agency who phoned us yesterday. They said they could make us Number One on LinkedIn”

(yes, really. No, I have no idea what that means. Neither did the potential client when challenged, but it sounds GREAT, right?!)

From a startup photography business, whose marketing manager told me she’d never used Facebook and had no idea how it worked, but was getting quotes for having it managed.

“We have decided to work with a company called XXXXX. A friend recommended them and they have quoted £99 which will include four maintenance updates a year”.

I hardly know where to start with that one either, but I think we can be 100% certain that she won’t be getting much out of Facebook this year, or any other.

These con-merchants are there because you want them

Okay, maybe not you personally, but enough people do. Here’s how it works, and the reason why certain parts of the digital marketing sector are going really rather bad indeed.

Everyone knows that the economic environment isn’t the easiest right now. Many companies are fighting for survival, and very few are in a position to turn away from an easy stream of revenue, even if they’re not comfortable with what that involves.

When enough potential clients line up and beg for this sort of rubbish, guess what? More and more suppliers will offer it. That’s how you end up with daft offers of the “200 Tweets per month for only £150” variety.**

**if you’re not sure why this is daft, please drop us an email and we’ll be delighted to explain in full.

How to guarantee you get terrible social media advice

So if you want to be saddled up and ridden into the sunset by a social media cowboy, here’s what  to do.

• Tell your prospective supplier  little to nothing about your business. Cowboys won’t be interested anyway – they’re going to sell you those “four maintenance updates per year” whatever.

• Insist on a fixed price at the earliest possible stage of your communication. Again, the harder you make it for your potential supplier to figure out what’s right for your business before committing to a price, the more likely you are to end up with rubbish being delivered to a budget.

• Avoid all discussion of strategy, or how exactly what they’re selling you will benefit your business. At a push, ask to be assured that you’ll “get exposure to a gazillion people on Facebook” – and be much more impressed by that than if they take you through, step by step, how Facebook works to provide that exposure, and how they’ll harness those functions to work for your business.

• Ensure you make a decision without  any understanding at all of social media. Who cares how the main social media sites work,  how they’re different from one another, or even whether you should be focusing on sorting out your terrible website first. Once you’ve ticked the “We’re on Twitter” box, you can sit back and watch the cash roll in.

• Under no circumstances check out the agency’s own website or social media feeds. If their website is full of meaningless jargon and they sent out a Tweet once in 2011 (which was a link to their home page), that’ll just complicate your decision, won’t it – and after all, it does it really matter, so long as they get you to Number One on LinkedIn…

Look, we know you’re busy, and you want this online marketing business to be as easy as taking an ad in the local paper.

But it just isn’t, it’s a whole lot more complicated than that.

So if you’re going to buy in social media services and you don’t want to throw your money in the bin – get some education about what you’re buying. Or work with an agency who’ll help you understand what’s what. But please, stop hunting for cowboys.

And if you’ve had any crazy, don’t-stand-up-to-the-light-of-day social media offers, please share them below….you know you want to!

Assuming that it’s true, we are pretty doubtful that it’s as widespread as some quarters of  the media is suggesting; after all, there are plenty of employers out there who still have no real idea what Facebook is or what it does, let alone why they might be interested in its contents from a recruitment point of view.  And, the implicit suggestion that Facebook users are getting a bit more savvy about locking down their privacy settings (otherwise the password wouldn’t be needed) is slightly encouraging.

However, the idea of anyone being required to hand over their passwords is pretty horrifying, and another example of how “new” technology is being treated far more aggressively than its older equivalents.

It’s a bit like the calls for Twitter to be blacked out during periods of civil unrest:  the telephone isn’t coming in for the same criticism, and yet phones are also crucial in planning and coordinating crimes, whilst also being much less easy to monitor!

No employer would dream of asking for phone transcripts of all their conversations with their friends and family, or the contents of the desk drawer where personal letters are kept.

Or, for that matter, their bank statements or any other records which are generally deemed by sane people to be a component of an individual’s private life. So how are Facebook and Twitter different?

We really hope that this is just over-reporting, and that anyone faced with such an intrusive request would politely explain why it’s inappropriate, and decline.

What do you think about this? Would you give your social media passwords away in order to land a job?

Earlier this week, I needed to cancel our Sky subscription. I’d heard on the grapevine to expect Sky not to make it easy for me, and I was right. (What other business can you imagine requiring a detailed discussion of how you use their services – “well, what programmes DO you watch?” – before allowing you to decline them, in case, and I quote, “you don’t know what you’re doing“).

But I digress. My point is, it doesn’t seem to have dawned on Sky that in the information age, if you annoy enough people, one or more of them will find a solution and put it out there for everyone else to work with. So, I find myself at this site – number four in the search rankings for “cancel sky subscription” – with comprehensive details of how to get the job done using your communication channel of choice.

The lesson? Sky could’ve provided that information themselves, and I’d have respected them (slightly)  more as a company. They chose not to, I got the information anyway, and they’re just left looking even more like the new British Gas – the company we all love to hate.

Google + development team: “our carrot is a little limp, time to get out the stick”

So, that’s Sky; maybe it’s what we’ve all come to respect from the consumer champion that is Rupert Murdoch. More surprising, though, to discover Google attempting a variant of the same ploy.

We were very interested to read an article this morning about how a coalition of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace software engineers have fought back against Google’s latest ploy to manipulate users into taking notice of Google Plus.

It would seem that, exactly as we predicted, Google’s product development team are increasingly falling back on their search domination as a mechanism for boosting the significance of G+.

How? by giving content that’s shared on G+ a disproportionate boost in search rankings. Disproportionate, we’d argue, because there’s plenty of data out there to show that G+ is only being adopted by a specific, narrow segment of the internet community (geeks and marketers, basically).

So to prioritise G+ content rather than, say, content being shared on Facebook (which has a much broader population) isn’t going to give the best search results for the average user.  It’s going to give the most Google centric search results.

Google have argued that it’s “too hard” to use social signals coming from other networks, which isn’t hugely convincing for a company of their resources. So, this group of coders have done it for them – creating a browser add-on which will offer an alternative view of search results; what the results would’ve looked like if other social networks were given due weight and G+ based shares not prioritised.

It’s currently only available in the US, but we’re sure it won’t take too much dissatisfaction with Google’s approach before it appears in a UK version.

It seems that more businesses need to understand what this all means: stop giving customers what they want, and someone who will is much less hard to find than they used to be! Even if you’re a local restaurant rather than a global mega-corporation, social media and the ease of web publishing means that you’re not in charge any more.

How LinkedIn is meant to be

Personally, I’ve been using LinkedIn less and less over the last year or two, but it was working with a client in the education sector last week that really brought the reasons why into focus for me.

For her, LinkedIn is still a great resource. Most of her contacts have kept their networks small and “real” (ie, people they’ve at least corresponded directly with a few times). The groups that we found which are relevant to her product, are genuine discussion forums full of useful information.

That’s how it’s supposed to be. But, my personal experience when I log in to LinkedIn couldn’t be more different. Especially in the marketing / small business sector, so many people seem to be making it their mission to behave like a one person spam campaign. By which I mean, trying to connect with everyone who’ll let them (with no obvious advantage beyond contact collecting), and treating Groups as a contest for who can post the most pointless rubbish.

“…sound and fury, signifying nothing..”

As soon as I log in, my inbox is twitching with invites from people i’ve never heard of, claiming to be a “friend” or “have done business with me”.  When I check out most of my Groups, the discussion threads are full of interaction-killing self promoting posts, containing nothing but a link to someone’s (irrelevant) blog article or company news.  To put it bluntly, if I want to read your latest blog post, I’ll subscribe to your blog. At the very least, add some invitation to discussion or commentary as to why it’s relevant before you spam your links all over the site. Ditto posting links to news articles; there are a few which are so relevant that they need little explanation, but quite often the links being posted are so irrelevant to the group topic, that it’s obvious the poster just wants to get their profile “up there” on the Influencers list.

The majority of the groups I see are so dominated by the members’ marketing agendas that there’s no space for actual discussion. It’s a shame because collaboration and business support are two of the best aspects of social media; on Twitter, for example, we often see people going well above and beyond to help out a stranger. And there are certainly exceptions within LinkedIn; for example, The Inspired Group often has detailed and supportive discussion threads on all kinds of unexpected topics, from a great group of businesses based around Cambridge.

But, it IS an exception, and increasingly the “me me me” approach seems to be spreading. It seems that more and more people have read those articles suggesting that marketing gold will result from them connecting and posting indescriminately (it won’t. Any more than having 100,000 spammy twitter accounts follow yours will benefit your business).Personally, I think that much more rigorous moderation is needed from the majority of Group owners, and ideally some kind of function within LinkedIn that allows you to discover the really valuable groups in any particular sector much more easily – a voting mechanism of some sort perhap.

Otherwise, will the less vocal majority just get turned off by the relentless noise and leave it to the spam merchants?

What do you think? Do you get more or less value from LinkedIn than you used to?

Nigel Botteril, owner of no less than five million-plus pound businesses; Phil Jones, now headed down an entrepreneurial path after an extremely impressive corporate career; and Brad Burton, who founded the 4N business networking organisation.

Getting their thoughts on various aspects of business growth was both fascinating and great fun. Nigel has the sort of energy levels that make most normal people need a nap just watching him, and never fails to come up with practical suggestions that will make an immediate difference to a business. Phil is the kind of guy who’d be taking The Apprentice by storm, if the show was actually about business rather than reality TV drama**. His sales coaching is first class and would benefit you whether you’ve been doing it for years or are in your first customer facing role. Brad had me almost in tears, and not all of laughter, as he talked about his journey to success and understanding what’s important in life.

What’s this got to do with you? If you’re in businesses, everything. The one thing that these guys have in common is state of mind – positive, energetic, never put anything off till tomorrow that could have been done a week ago whilst simultaneously learning to unicyle. When you’re working in a smaller business and your job title is “Everything”, it’s really beneficial to occasionally spend time with people who’ve been there, bought the tshirt and resold it at a profit, and who can help you refocus on what’s really important or try something new.

So this post is really three things. A minor “thankyou” to those people for making my week so much more than it otherwise would have been; a reminder to myself that taking time out for this kind of thing is such a worthwhile investment; and a suggestion for our readers to FIND THE TIME to seek out people like these. The tax forms will still be there when you get back, but you’ll have a good reason to do something more important first!

**yeah, we love it too. Don’t tell.