"Firms could get better social media results from the Karate Kid film than going to conferences" Lyndon Antcliff Interview

What got you into social media?

Social media is a means to an end, it's a communication tool and is very effective in targeting specific groups with tailor made content in which to get their attention, engage and get a result.

Is it for every business?

It's excellent for creating networks of like minded people who share a common purpose. From a business point of few it can be very effective in bypassing established old media and connect directly with customers

and their tribe.

Every business can benefit directly by cutting out the middle man and connecting in a low cost way to the people who buy the stuff the business makes. It's not simply a sales tool which I think a lot of businesses make the mistake of focussing on. It's a great tool for research and customer relations, by using social media in these areas costs can be cut and the business in enabled to be nimbler and more

responsive to the market place.

Is there a lot of snake oil about social media?

Because the cost of entry to space is in time and not money it enables anyone with the inclination to enter the space and offer services. Add to this the fact that it's difficult to accurately assess who is offering the good stuff, because it's still a new thing and has not yet an established track record.

Most established businesses have had difficulty in getting around the concepts of social media and have been taken advantage of.

I have noticed quite a few PR companies simply bolt on a "social media" offering and all they have done is open a Twitter account and added a link on their page. There are actually very few experienced people who have a deep knowledge of the space.

One easy way for a business to ascertain the quality of a social media service is to ask "how old their Twitter account is" and what is their follower to follows ratio, as it's relatively easy to buy Twitter followers. But hard work to get people to follow you when you don't follow them back.

There’s an old argument that PR/marketing/advertising should own

social media - should any of them?

I think PR people have taken a long time to really "get" social media and a lot of them still don't. Because it's counter-intuitive to the old way of doing PR. Social media takes away a few layers of clothing leaving the practitioner semi-naked. The group that I think dominated social media early on was the search engine optimisers, as they are used to being in an environment where they have to adapt and have no real baggage when it came to new social media systems.

The sectors are adapting quickly, although you still see basic errors occuring, for example the recent Mountain Dew fiasco where the company asked for suggestions for names of their new beverage and got spammed with outrageous suggestions. Whoever put together that campaign simply did not understand that you need real time monitoring to weed out the brand damaging suggestions. Something which an SEO or web developer would have realised, but a lot of these marketing types do not spend time with the people who actually drive these contests. It may not even have crossed the mind of a marketing type that some bored social media user is going to spend time coming up with Nazi/sexual/Animalistic far out names for their sugary fizzy drink and spam their competition.

Why is there such a fear over traditional ROI? Surely it’s the best

metric to be using?

People fear change, the ROI can be computed, it simply needs new metrics. A lot of the results that social media can generate are in branding and customer relations, which are difficult to asses in a spreadsheet. Fortunately this problem is being solved by the numerous social media monitoring services that are sprouting up.

None of them really give the whole picture though, but this can be mitigated by having people on staff who are plugged in to the tribe and can effectively monitor and interact. Social media noise creates a narrative rather than data for spreadsheets. As long as you have an interpreter to read the bones, getting a defined metric isn't a problem.

What’s your favourite social media sites?

Twitter, it's immediate, has a wide following and enough people I can follow and learn from. Of course it has its problems and weaknesses, but these can be mitigated about if known.

The worst is G+ or is it Google Plus, I can never remember. But it isn't really a social media system, it's more of the glue between the Google properties and an information gathering system. But it's actually getting better, although it's not quite as intuitive and you can tell it's been created by a bunch of engineers rather than people who like to party.

Facebook is interesting as most businesses find it very tricky to get it to work for them, whilst others are making hay with it.

Pinterest is establishing itself as an effective social networking tool within specific industries such as fashion.

Social media platforms are merging with content platforms, which is essentially what Pinterest is and also Tumblr. In many ways they are more effective as they connect people through the type of content they

produce, rather than who the person is. This is something that a business can really take hold of.

If you are in a sector like the Water Treatment construction industry, you could totally own the space by using sites like Pinterest andTumblr by uploading photographs of your work and although would not result in direct sales would come up in the search engines and increase your brand with potential clients. The problem is of course that those who work in such industries and Water Treatment Construction are about as far away from using social media as an effective business tool as you are likely to get. Even though most people who work in it at least have a Facebook account to look at shared family pictures.

In your eyes, what’s the biggest barrier to adoption of social media? How would you tell people/firms to overcome this?

How to explain the benefits of social media when they are not directly trackable is the most difficult. It's obvious to me as someone who works in the industry of the benefit to a sector like the Water Treatment Construction industry of an effective social media strategy. But the mind set of people in these types of industries is antithetical to the soft results that social media can give.

The noise that social makes can easily be tracked, but the benefits are a lot softer to define.

However, in these industries I like to explain that you only need one sale, or one contact can result in establishing sales that could be in their millions. I have actually seen this happen where a US based engineering company connects with a company in Wales, resulting in business worth millions simply from the basis of an internet search and as social media ranks well in search engines it makes it a no brainer.

If you had to choose one platform - for you personally - what would it be and why?

I probably couldn't live without Twitter. Most of my clients use it and it has resulted in getting a lot of business. No other platform has done that for me. I remember tweeting the success of one client and that directly resulted in landing a £2,400 contract. Of course the person who initiated that had followed me for a long time and had heard me speak at conferences and read my blog. But if I hadn't tweeted that specific message I may not have got the business.

Twitter is a great trigger for action.

What’s the can’t live without Apps on your smartphone?

On my iPhone the must-haves are for email, BBC news, RSS reader, Twitter, Red Laser (I love to scan and save money) and Ice Age Village (it helps keep the kids quiet).

What’s the must-have Apps on your tablet?

I have an iPad and when I got it I had no idea what to use it for apart from Google Maps, I'm a big fan of maps. Evernote, Mr. Reader, Instapaper, Raven SEO tool and the Twitter app. Again it's loaded with games for the kids and many a time it has woken me up at 4AM with a notification that a horse's shed has been painted.

What motivates you when you’re down/seeking creativity - what’s the one thing that gets the brain going when you have to dig deep?

It's not actually money, it's more about creating something unique and artful. When working with the clients it helps if they get it and are behind what you are good at. Being older than most social media and content marketers I find I can dig into a lot of content I have used over the years and use that. More than a number of times the motivation is that I get to use a certain idea that has been knocking around my head for 10 or 20 years.

Given that the way most social media institutions - Facebook, Google, Twitter - are making their money is through the most traditional of ways - advertising - is this a failure of thinking? Surely if social media is such a paradigm shift, we wouldn’t be relying on advertising just like we have done since 1955?

Social media hasn't changed the fundamentals, people either buy stuff or services. They need a place where they can learn which stuff to buy. This is always going to represent the basic economy and social media will always follow where the money is. The shift has really been in cutting out the middle man and handing more power of choice to the general population.

Should the phrase “social media” be abolished as there is so much to it - it can be linkbuilding, community engagement, community building, sales, SEO, blogging, gathering and seeding visual information - should we be at a stage now where people get to specify what part of this their talents lie in?

It would be difficult to know what to replace it with. As there are many components to social media you need a term that brings them all together. In the industry we spend a lot of time creating and discussing which terms are best suited and there are ones that I find personally jarring but have to use because if you didn't you wouldn't be able to communicate with people. For example "content marketing", it's a bit of a bonkers term but we are stuck with it.

Companies seem to be concentrating their efforts on Facebook - is this a dangerous move?

Absolutely, your social media strategy should be planting seeds in many fields. Any reliance on a single social media platform is highly dangerous because you do not own your account, you merely lease it from the owner. Also, you are only there because people are there and people can move in a mouse click, as we learned from MySpace.

The effort a company should be concentrating on is changing it's mindset rather than thinking a certain social media platform is going to be the answer. Social media output should be a natural part of the online marketing strategy and this can only happen if a company adopts the correct mind set. Most companies would get a lot of benefit in making their staff watch the Karate Kidinstead of sending them to expensive conferences.

The solution is found in the most important asset of any business, its people. But first, they need to adopt the stance.

Where do you see social media being in five years time?

A maturing of the market will result in a more educated user base. There will be social media platforms that will dominate that haven't even been thought of yet.

The thing I can be certain of is that the platforms will change in importance, but the art of making these platforms work for your business will stay the same. Your personal brand will be more important than your company brand.

We're also seeing the death of the CV. Instead, simply look at the social media footprint a person has instead - especially if they are under 25

For those thinking of getting into social media, any tips or pointers?

• Understand that there is a learning curve where you will get no benefit.
• Be useful to others.
• Always pause when pressing the publish button.
• Include all the staff in the social media strategy.
• Your social media footprint is permanent, it amazes me that people put out so much negative information about themselves.
• Become part of a tribe and then build your own tribe.
• Lastly, learn to identify the mover and shakers and who is trying to pull a fast one.