Last week I went along to Reading uni public lecture titles “Twitter Nation: Keeping up with the 21st century consumer” (More info here). It was presented by Moira Clark who although I thought was an excellent presenter I think the lecture title was a little misleading. The lecture focused very much on social media in general with only a slightly mention of Twitter (with what I personally thought was a bad description on what it is!), she didn’t even advertise her own twitter profile or mention a twitter tag at the start of the lecture. After looking after it seems she didn’t even have a twitter account until a few days before the lecture! Therefore I didn’t end up using a tag making it more difficult to find / follow 🙁 but if you want to hunt you can see my updates from the lecture (6th Oct) on my Twitter stream.
Although I must admit I didn’t really learn anything new I did enjoy the lecture. Moira was a great presenter and with a very varied audience I can see why spoke at a high level. The main focus of the lecture was discussing why people use social media ? (I used #socnet tag on twitter) with each reason she then provided a variety of examples. Here’s an overview with some of the examples she gave:
- General & Targeted advertising:
Cadburys monkey
- Awareness campaignes
Transport for London – Think Bike - Recruitment
SecondLife – IBM even interview people on there! - Building relationships
Find old friends / Meet new people - Community Engagement
Finding people with similar interests – Secondlife - Crowd Sourcing
Use your customers to do your R&D – She talked about lego factory - Reputation Management
American Airlines: Broken Guitar
She closed the lecture with the Susan Boyle audition YouTube video which had 116 million views!! No doubt those of you reading this were one of those!
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