Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

This post was inspired by an email I received this morning about an event entitled “Managing the Consumer Clamour“.

The digital industry appears to be split into two in my opinion. The first half is made up of those who don’t talk about ‘managing the consumer’ because they understand the art of conversation - instead, they talk about how to enable a better conversation between brand and consumer. In fact, the best of them aren’t talking about it at all, they’re just doing it as it comes natural.

The other half is made up of old media - they’re still talking about ‘managing the consumer’ and trying to figure out how to control what they say.

You can’t manage the consumer clamour. What you can do, is influence it by making sure you get involved in the conversation. It’s cheaper and easier than ever, with tools readily available to help everyone become a publisher/creator - enabling them to influence the perception of a particular brand. This is normally done through personal blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and other forms of public arenas where it’s easy to publish an opinion for everyone to see.

What should you do?

Stop talking about trying to manage what people say. It’s impossible. In fact, trying to control what people say is worse than doing nothing. Instead, talk about how to get involved by listening to what the crowd has to say and then react accordingly. Soon, you will become proactive by asking the crowd what they think upfront.

If only I was Hugh McLeod. I could capture all of this and more, in one cartoon. Here’s a post by Hugh that’s relevant though.

Here are some cool tools for Twitter users - thanks to Philip Wilkinson

1. TweetWheel - Which of your followers know each other? Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually.
2. TwerpScan - If there are opportunistic marketers following everyone under the sun in the hope those good souls will just automatically follow them back, this tool might help identify those whom you may want to block.
3. Summize - Good, fast Twitter search engine
4. Twitt(url)y - Does a nice job of providing a Techmeme style representation of up and coming URLs that are mentioned in individual Tweets.
5. TweetBeep - as Google alerts but for Twitter

Let me know via the comments if you know of any more and I’ll add them later.

This is my first ever video post so please forgive the fact that it’s very rough around the edges. Please feel free to provide tips and feedback.

Download the video to your iTunes (4.2 MB; 02:43 minutes)

Links

• Official Web Mission Web site
• Coverage of the Web Mission on TechCrunch.com and TechCrunch.co.uk
• Some information about wubud on TechCrunch.

I read a great post on TechCrunch and thought it was worth sharing here. In short, old media people say that to succeed on the Web, they should stop trying to control the message or the audience. People who get this, don’t talk about it - it’s already assumed. I agree 100%.

Read the full post.

I was in the kitchen putting together one of the most heart-attack-enabled sandwichs you could imagine, when I started to think about the movies I rented for the long weekend. In true style, my thoughts quickly evolved into work-mode. I started to think about how good they were (or weren’t) and whether I’d use a review Web site to write what I thought about each one.

The answer was obvious. No. I couldn’t be bothered to write a review to say a particular movie was ‘ok’. If it’s ok, I’m not likely to remember it 10 minutes later, let alone spend time on the Web to write my thoughts down. It’s useful to be able to read movie reviews before renting them. But isn’t it better to ask trusted friends for their recommendations - it’s certainly a much quicker route to getting what you want; a decent movie. That’s not to say that travel review Web sites like TripAdvisor aren’t great, because they are. Sites like TripAdvisor work because they’re very niche.

The answer is either a recommendation-based site for each topic of interest, or one Web site which deals only with recommendations for each topic. The latter is the obvious choice as you only want to join one community driven site. The site/product is only as good as the people using it so the more friends you have using it, the better the experience.

Recommend Box will soon be my central source for recommendations because many of my friends also use it. It’s far from perfect, there are many changes to make the site more user friendly and new features to make it more compelling in the forthcoming release. When these come out in release 2 I’ll use it in anger.

If you want to ask people you trust to make recommendations about books, movies, restaurants and the like, join Recommend Box and get your friends to do the same.

When I have time to write a review about review sites, I’ll tell you why I think Crowdstorm has the most potential.