They say the best ideas are the simple ones! I’ve worked for over 20 years now and across all the marketing disciplines I’ve been involved with I must have come up with or shared thousands of ideas for products, services, events, brands, concepts and communications.

None of them have made me rich (Yet! but my day is coming) or provided me with as much pleasure as what happened when a friend and colleague of mine (the legend that is Mark Jennings from D8 in Glasgow) and I came up with something.

Let me explain…

If we build it…will they come?

Both Mark and I work in the online world. He runs a successful web development, design and marketing company in Glasgow. I run Cowbell, which tries to clear up the confusion surrounding social media and integrate digital marketing with traditional. The key to the story is that we both like to work hard and by god – we both like to play hard, which in our world means having a beer.

After a few chats over the odd beer (again!) we felt that social media needed to stop with all the ‘Top 5 ways twitter will make you a billionaire’, ’100 ways that social media will cure all diseases’ and ’43 reasons to have to have a Facebook account or your house will burn down’ and well how else can I say it – get social!

About 30 minutes later #themeet140 was born and our connections and others all became part of & shared owners of our dream.

The premise was, and is, simple! Anyone from within the social media world is invited to a pub or bar in a town near you to meet up, have a few drinks and mix with people who have similar interests and lives as you and everyone can ask others to come. I know that most of you reading this can do that at any time across your week but for some reason this is special.

Ask anyone of the 100 plus people who’ve already been to one and they’ll tell you about the special atmosphere, the way that no one sells to anyone else (this is an unwritten rule and will not be tolerated), and how they immediately felt welcome and part of the whole group from the minute they walked in.

My epiphany for on all of this happened on Wednesday night during the amazing #themeet140 in Glasgow. Before it began I knew one person, by the end of it I had 30 new friends and everyone of them has connected with me again since the event. I looked around the room at about 9.30pm and all I could see was groups of people who had never met each before engaging, smiling (actually, laughing most of the time) and drinking.

There are no presentations, no agenda, no egos and no bullshit.

Happy Days

Instead there’s a sea of people connecting, engaging, sharing and all wanting to know when the next one comes back to town.

Glasgow’s night was full of special people who all brought their own essence and flavour to the night. London and Cheltenham did the same, and as I said to Mark later on Wednesday night

“there’s nothing better than following the hashtag the next day and seeing the impact the night had on everyone’s mood and week”

Those who were at the London and Cheltenham events have said which was better out of the five or six so far? The truth is none of them and all of them. Each one has brought something completely different because each  brings new people.

Both Mark and I are passionate about these nights. They bring great people together. #THEmeet140 is a case study for social media success as it’s supposed to be a communications tool where new connections are made, or repaired, listened to and engaged with. Business can never think it can only sit within the status updates, 140 character messages or network activity. We have to get out there and meet and communicate directly with people.

As Mark said to me yesterday

“If it ends tomorrow…then Twitter has been worth it!”

Let’s hope more and more people and businesses can say the same thing over the years to come.

The future

There’s no agenda and there’s no plan because if we do that then it loses everything it has become – a fluid and fun night that changes as each conversation is in full flow. If our accidental events are something you might want to go to then can I suggest that you follow us on twitter and keep up with the hashtag.

More nights out across the country will be happening soon. For those of you who’ve been before then let us know what you love or hate about them. For those of you who might come along then by all means introduce yourselves in the comments and keep in touch.

Details

Follow me or Mark on twitter

Follow the hashtag – #themeet140 or the twitter account Themeet140

Hilarious….but true

Living in 2009

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2009 when…

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.
2 You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.
3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.
4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.
5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don’t have e-mail addresses.
6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.
7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.
8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.
10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.
11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )
12 You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.
13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.
14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.
15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list

AND NOW YOU ARE LAUGHING at yourself.

Go on, forward this to your friends. You know you want to.

Here are some statistics (via econsultancy). Now I know they’re just numbers and you can say they don’t actually mean anything, but surely Social Media is having a major impact on millions of lives.

• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email, 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the Internet is on social media sites.

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
• 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The Internet took four years to reach 50 million people… In  less than nine months Facebook added 100 million users.
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million.
• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active Internet users regularly read blogs

FACEBOOK

All of this points to a what can easily be called a phenomenon.But we need to answer some questions to help us evaluate our participation.

Is it good for us? Do we benefit personally? Is your Business/company benefiting? What are the returns?

The answers to these questions will depend on what you wanted to get out of it in the first place. From the personal angle, then if you want friendship, participation, one-to-one engagement then it’s for you. But what do you ultimately get back? Some would some a sense of community and belonging but the flip side is that many get lost in cyberspace and forget about reality and previously standard forms of communication such as ‘talking’ and ‘socialising’.

YOUTUBE

Businesses look for different returns, ultimately revenue and brand following. But the first mistake made is that they jump head first; take the ‘SELL, SELL, SELL’ approach and quickly turn consumers, followers and buyers away. The trick is to build a following by providing information, provoking debate, responding to questions and consumer needs.

Social Media will always be an evolving beast. It will become stronger and maybe even move into a downturn, but when you can for the first time since marketing began we can actively engage on an one-to-one basis with your target audience then it’s definitely here to stay!

As social media grows at a rate unseen even in ‘online’ terms many are asking the question what is the value of social media and is it all worth it?

Well I could ramble on for hundreds of words (never recommended) or you could just spend four minutes watching the following video and then probably come to the same conclusion that most do.

Points the video shows include

1. social media has overtaken pron as the #1 activity online
2. radio took 50 years to reach an audience of 50 million. Facebook too 9 months to have 100 million subscribers
3. If Facebook were a country then it would be the fourth largest nation in the world
4. 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a source of employment
5. & 80% of Twitter uses access the service through their mobiles

That Social Media is

• new
• exciting
• relevant
• interesting
• creates engagement
• builds communities
• and gives the user exactly what they want.

…Now if anyone was to tell you that online would help you do that 5 years ago, then you’d have jumped straight in. Welcome to the future. Viva la revolution…

Are you trawling the internet for anything, just anything that’ll help you swerve through the mindfield jargon and rubbish.

Fear not here are some links to answers to some of those questions you’re all asking:

Question: search engine opitmisation – what’s right and what’s wrong?

go to: http://tinyurl.com/6ahfgy

Twitter: What’s it all about?

go to: http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-twitter/

What’s the best browser, and why?

http://hubpages.com/hub/What-is-the-best-browser

A new user guide to Facebook required?

http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-facebook/

Youtube….I’ve heard about it but what exactly is it and what will I get from it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

NOTE: wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is great for almost anything you need help with. Simply type in the word/description and a detailed result will appear.

What is wikipedia?

Wikipedia (pronounced /ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/ or /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/) is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau (a combination of portions of two words and their meanings) of the words wiki (a type of collaborative Web site) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world; anyone can edit it. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. As of today, there are 2,820,243 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia…