Let’s quickly define some basic terms.

Twitter – your world in one hundred and forty (140) characters. It gives the opportunity to answer the question, ‘what are you doing now’?

Tweep/Twitterer – the person tweeting

Handle – name of the tweep; could be the person’s real name, an adaptation of the name, or something totally different.

Follow – adding people who interest you to your Twitter reading list. Their tweets will appear automatically.

Hash tag – A hash tag or hashtag is a way of organizing your updates for Twitter search engines. One of the currently most commonly used hash tag on Twitter is #followfriday where users network by providing the names of their favorite people to follow on Twitter.

Direct Message – DM for short, it refers to private messaging on Twitter between two people. If Jeremy follows Brandon, Brandon can send a DM to Jeremy. Jeremy can only reply the DM if Brandon ‘follows’ him back. So, why consider Twitter for your business? – because of  the immediacy it affords your business. Whether it is praise, criticism, clarification, or a query, it is fast, and used properly, boosts the customer service perception your audience will have of your company.

It also functions as a great listening tool. – it reduces your organization’s dependence on traditional media channels (which you might not be able to afford anyway) and counters inaccurate press coverage. It increases the reach of your existing content online by providing easy access for journalists, bloggers, etc. – most importantly, because your target demographic is there. That means that if your target is not on Twitter, it will be a little fool hardy to go on Twitter and hope to reach out to them. *note to self: discuss ‘what platform for what business’ soon*

Are you convinced yet? Let me know!

Apart from crushing heavily on Mickey (Adrian Lester) and his ‘out-of-this-world’ smile, I love Hustle because each episode exposes me to the different ways people bring heartache upon themselves by trying to reap where they have not sown, make ridiculous profits, or even worse, defraud the next man. Are the Hustle team righteous? Of course not; evil cannot cancel out evil, and two wrongs don’t make a right. Still love them though!

Away from Hustle, I have two rules for avoiding heartache in business. These two nuggets are guaranteed winners long as they’re applied exactly as prescribed.

1. There is social media and the ‘miracles’ it will work for your business as far as publicity and advertising are concerned. There is also something called a work ethic, without which both the social media platforms, and the business will fail. Unfortunately today young business owners spend more time tweeting and facebooking about their businesses than actually getting any work done.

Quick example: a friend of mine had a business and is quite active on social media promoting it; we’ll call her A. Recently, another friend (call her B) tweeted about needing the service A offers so I introduced them on Twitter. Two days after B tweets that A kept her waiting for four hours and she’s never using her service again.

Social media – good work ethic + all the recommendations in the world = heartache, brought on by failure.

2.Much as you can, avoid doing business with family, especially in parts of the world where ‘family’ is exalted over professionalism. I’ve written about landlords letting their property to family and the drama that goes with that, but I have a personal example now.

My family needed a service, and contracted two different companies to provide it – three items from Company A, and three items from Company B (who we’re distantly related to).

Company A delivers on schedule; on inspection the goods are of a good quality, and there is evidence that they used their initiative. Company B is paid in full, yet the goods are two weeks late. There are major errors in one during the draft inspection so it’s sent back.

48 hours to when these goods will be used, they’re yet to arrive, and the representative is unreachable. Several calls without any response and then by 5pm the representative picks up and says, “I’m in fellowship please, you’re calling my Galaxy Tab and its ringtone is loud”.

Took all of me (and some) to be civil and for a few reasons

• How was I to know you were in church? If you’d had picked up the entire day we’d been ringing your phone, or had the decency to return the calls….
• I have one number for  you. What other way should I have tried to reach you? Seance? Mind travel? By the way, I’m excited you have a Galaxy Tab, SMH.
• Why didn’t you just deliver when you said you would?

This rep sent someone to deliver the goods the day before they were to be used (didn’t have the courtesy to bring them personally or even send a delivery/quantity note), and you can bet they were substandard. What did we do? Nothing. Why? Family. Will we use Company B’s service again? Not even if our lives depended on it!

There you have it! Thank me later…

Fresh off the Arab Revolution, there were stories from Egypt, India, Nigeria, Germany, etc. on our now defunct website and on the day, brilliant presentations from Noha Atef, Ramy Raoof, among others, and then robust discussions from the over 70 people in the room, and many more online.

I was in charge of fundraising, budget, and logistics; and I worked with our Mark Ashfield, our team leader to refine our applications for funding, scale down and then implement it. I also took care of all the notices used on the day.

It was a good experience being a part of this event, working on a budget, and crunching numbers that quite a number of other people depended on.

URASTAR has been in existence since 2003, and it was founded by Adrian Burke, a social justice artist more popularly known as ‘Witness’. It was registered as a Community Interest Company in 2009.

As part of

The Creative Production Unit of the BBC Media Action in Abuja, Nigeria invited me to facilitate a workshop on the 6th of August 2012 to evaluate their use of new media in their production and broadcasts, and explore ways of increasing interaction. My 40 minute presentation was titled, New Media + Radio: Enhancing Effectiveness, and it can be found here.

• Created accounts for NERC on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr with a progressive increase in followership

• Changed the tone of interaction with its publics from derogatory to a civil, enlightened discourse.

• Created accounts for some of the principal officers at the commission

• Managed the growing online community, created a strategy for informing NERC’s publics on its activities every single day.

• Created a directory type service where customers around the country got redirected to the closest Customer Care Units to them

• Trained staff to manage the official accounts.

The biggest thing about the NERC consultancy was watching attitudes change, and the discussion progress on a lot of levels in such a short period. Despite the bureaucracy and quite a few challenges with this project, the success was outstanding, and palpable.

The challenge for NERC, as ensconced in our final report, is to strive to be better at communicating with Nigerians what they are up to per time, and work to engrave in their hearts that for NERC, the customer truly is key.

Blogs

Weblogs, or blogs, are websites that usually combine text, images, and links to other blogs and web sites related to its topic. Many bloggers provide commentary or news on a particular subject while others use them as forms of personal online diaries. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of the tool. Blogs have been heralded as a revolution in mass communication. The popularity of blogs, is among others, due to the below factors:

Bookmarking and link sharing services

Social bookmarking is a way of easily saving, tagging and sharing information online. In these systems, saved links are usually public, though they can also be saved privately and shared only with specified people or groups.  Many services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware and discover new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. The sites are free.

Del.icio.us is currently the most popular bookmarking service. Digg, Yahoo!Buzz, and Reddit are a few other examples of tools through which people can discover and share content on the internet by submitting links and stories to the site, as well as rating and commenting on submitted links and stories.

Microblogs

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write and publish brief text updates. The benefit of micro-blogging is that messages can be submitted rapidly in a variety of ways, including text and instant messaging, email, MP3 or through the web.  Messages can thus be sent on the move, for example from a mobile phone and are instantly updated on a blog and to subscribers/followers.

The most popular microblog service are Twitter (up to 140 characters/each post) and Tumblr (unlimited characters).

Mobile applications (mobile apps)

This term is used to describe Internet applications that run on smart phones and other mobile devices. Mobile applications connect users to online services commonly accessed on desktops or laptops, and make it easier to use the Internet on their portable devices.

Online chats

Online chat is a way of communicating informally by sending text messages to people in the same online chat-room in real-time, using tools such as instant messaging. File sharing and web cameras are included in some programmes and almost all online chat or messaging services allow users to display or send photos. Among the more popular instant messaging services are American Online (AOL) Instant Messenger, Microsoft Network (MSN) Messenger, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger.

Podcasts

A podcast is audio or video content that can be downloaded automatically through a subscription to a website so you can view or listen offline. The name refers to Apple’s iPod system, and their iTunes store is still the main source of podcasts. SoundCloud is also very popular for podcast hosting and sharing and has the advantage of being open to all.

 Social networking services

A social network site is a service, which enables the creation of an online community.  The main types of social networking services contain directories, means to connect with other users, and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods combine these functions with a variety of externally built applications, with Facebook being the most widely used.

Alongside blogging, social networking has become the most powerful new way of sharing information and connecting with people.   The immensely popular service places peer-to-peer influencing at the core, and enables local conversations to rapidly spread on a global scale.  Understanding the way people link through these networks, picking up, creating and sharing content on the way, is central to success in social media.

Video and photo sharing

Video sharing websites enable users to upload, share and view video clips. The bulk of video sites offer free services and are easy to use. The most popular video site is YouTube. Other popular sites include Google Video, Yahoo Video and Vimeo.

With the tag line ‘Broadcast Yourself’, YouTube has fundamentally changed how video content is delivered. Previously one had to invest a significant amount of money to produce a sophisticated video that would attract attention.  Now anyone with access to a handheld camera and a good idea has the means to create a video viewed by millions, opening up a completely new environment for marketing.

Flickr is currently the most used photo-sharing site. In addition to being a popular web site for sharing personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its organization tools, which allow photos to be tagged and browsed by a certain topic.

Virtual Worlds

A virtual world is a computer based, simulated environment intended for users to inhabit and interact through created avatars. The basic avatar is human in appearance, but may be of either gender, have a wide range of physical attributes, and may be clothed or otherwise customized to produce a wide variety of virtual life forms.

The most popular of these worlds are Second Life, a 3D world created mostly by its residents, followed by Habbo.   Due to their growing popularity, virtual worlds are increasingly being used by the private and non-for-profit sector for marketing, educational and information sharing purposes.

Widgets

A widget is a snapshot of a web page that is displayed in another web site by pasting a small piece of code on the page.  It allows information to be shown on the site without the host having to create and update the content.

That’s it! The third and final bit of this series! Any questions? Get in touch!

Many thanks to Mari Tikkanen of M4ID, she gave these resources at the New Media and Governance Conference in Abuja earlier this year. She’s on Twitter as @M4ID_Mari and is interested in putting social media, technology and creativity to work for international development and health. 

Photo Credit: JefferyTurner via Compfight cc

Welcome to Part Two of my Term, Terms and Terminologies Series…

First part was published a few days ago, and we’re continuing with a few more terms I think anyone playing around with social media (either for marketing, advertising, content production, etc) should be aware of. Enjoy, and share with a friend!

Platforms are the frameworks or systems within which tools work. A platform may be as broad as mobile telephony, or as narrow as a piece of software that has different modules like blogs, forums, and wikis in a suite of tools.

Profiles are the information that people provide about themselves when signing up for a social networking site. As well as a picture (avatar) and basic information, this may include personal and business interests, a “blurb” about oneself, and tags to help people search for like-minded people.

Streaming is a way of accessing audio or visual data that is hosted elsewhere on the web without downloading the file and opening it on ones own computer.

Tags are keywords attached to a blog post, bookmark, photo or other item of content so people can find them easily through searches and aggregation. 
Tags can usually be freely chosen – and so form part of a folksonomy – while categories are predetermined and are part of a taxonomy.

Threads are strands of conversation. On an email list or web forum they will be defined by messages that use the same subject. On blogs they are less clearly defined, but emerge through comments and trackbacks.

Tool is used as shorthand for a software application.

User-generated content refers to any text, photos and other material produced by people who don’t own or control the space and previously just consumed content. Typically it refers to users of a website posting content directly to a web platform, but can also refer to any public content created by participants of a project, such as videos or SMS messages.

URL stands for Unique Resource Locator, and is the technical term for a web address, like http://www.m4id.fi/.

Web 2.0 is a term coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004 to describe blogs, wikis, social networking sites and other internet-based services that promote community, collaboration and content-sharing, as distinct from the older content publishing and e-commerce websites (Web 1.0).

A wiki is a web page, or set of pages, that can be edited collaboratively. The best-known example is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia created by thousands of contributors across the world. Once people have appropriate permissions – set by the wiki owner – they can create pages and/or add to and alter existing pages.

That’s it, second part done! Believe it or not, there’s a third, and concluding part so you’re coming back for it! I’m sure you will!

Many thanks to Mari Tikkanen of M4ID, she gave these resources at the New Media and Governance Conference in Abuja earlier this year. She’s on Twitter as @M4ID_Mari and is interested in putting social media, technology and creativity to work for international development and health. 

And then I thought, why not share some of the basic terminologies I’ve used? Why not start a series where I localise some of the terms we see flying around? Of course it has to do with social media; welcome to Part 1 of Term, Terms and Terminologies! Share with a friend!

Community building is the process of recruiting potential community or network participants, helping them to find shared interests and goals, use the technology, and develop useful conversations.

Commons refers to online spaces, which are held in trust for people/users and are owned by everyone. The term has become particularly popular due to its use in the Creative Commons license.

Crowdsourcing refers to harnessing the skills and enthusiasm of those outside an organization who are prepared to volunteer their time and skills, contribute content and collectively help solve problems.

Embedding is a way of displaying content that is hosted elsewhere on the web (like videos on YouTube or pictures on Flickr), on a website or blog without hosting the files oneself. Most websites that host such content provide the “embed code” for users to copy and paste onto their own sites.

Feeds are the means by which one can read, view or listen to items from blogs and other feed-enabled sites without visiting the site, by subscribing and using an aggregator or feed reader. Feeds contain the content of an item and any associated tags without the design or structure of a web page. They can also be read by other websites, allowing the content of a feed to be embedded in different forms on a range of websites and platforms such as mobile sites.

Followers are the individuals who subscribe to a persons/organizations RSS feeds, have connected with a networking space (like Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr – anywhere that allows users to “friend” other users), or have joined a network based on ones blog, website, or group.

Hashtags are used in Twitter to add a subject keyword to a post, such as #Obama or #haiti.

Mashups are the combination of two or more web applications to create an integrated application for specific repurposing; for example, combining Google Maps technology with an SMS service to automatically map the location of users.

Open source software is any computer software whose source code is open for users to study, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in some form. It is often developed in a public, collaborative manner and the main advantage is that it lets developers use each other’s work to make quick progress building software and websites.

That’s part one, come back in a few days for part two!

Many thanks to Mari Tikkanen of M4ID, she gave these resources at the New Media and Governance Conference in Abuja earlier this year. She’s on Twitter as @M4ID_Mari and is interested in putting social media, technology and creativity to work for international development and health.