RMM

Just recently my Twitter feed has been hi-jacked by a nasty little phenomena: restaurants re-tweeting positive messages from their patrons. Ok, it’s not a hangable crime and it’s certainly not harming anyone but it’s beginning to grate on me. Testimonials are all well and good but Twitter is not the place for them. It makes the restaurants who do it (and here I won’t name names) look mindlessly self-interested. Re-tweet a review, by all means, but I really don’t care that someone whom i’ve never met gushed with praised after eating your fillet mignon. If i’m following you on Twitter already, chances are I already like your food too.

So what should restaurants be using Twitter for? Well here’s a few thoughts for starters:

• In truth a number of restaurants are already using Twitter for customer service (i’ve previously blogged about it here) and it makes sense that if someone has a complaint or query about a restaurant that the restaurant use Twitter to respond in a timely manner.
• Either by observing pre-existing buzz on Twitter or by actively asking for input, restaurants can make use of Twitter as an R&D tool to improve their menu, service or dining experience.
• Communicating deals and offers (e.g. early bird specials) via Twitter is a natural fit. Marketing,  especially where the message is time-sensitive fits with the real-time nature of Twitter, just  don’t use Twitter solely as avehicle for marketing promotions!
• Many restaurants can also benefit from the way their clientele treat dining out as part of their lifestyle. Twitter can support this through increased customer experience, providing news about life at the restaurant, e.g. trying to source a new local beef producer, updates about the restaurant’s commitment to sustainability amd so on.

So please, restaurateurs, stop re-tweeting vacuous praise and start leveraging the oppportunities Twitter has to offer!

What is it?

Facebook Places is a (currently US-only) additional feature which allows Facebook Mobile users to check into locations. Sound familiar? Like Foursquare/Gowalla, you can signal your location, whether it’s at a bar, shop, building, wherever. A key difference between Places and Foursquare is that Facebook has a ready-built userbase in the millions. Places also allows your friends to check you in for you, in a way that one Facebook engineer described as someone tagging you in a photo. And finally, there’s no reward system like badges - it’s a purely social tool. Facebook’s intention is to eventually allow third-party services such as Gowalla or Foursquare integrate, though it’s so far unclear as to how this would work exactly.

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What is it?

Another development in the location-based service world, and thus another location-based technology briefing. Shopkick is a newly launched iPhone app, which, lazily summarised, is the ‘Foursquare for shopping’. This is, however, a slightly misleading description as Foursquare functions around user tips, comments and interaction - none of which feature in Shopkick.

Nonetheless, Business Insider predicts big things for this app which rewards users not only for check-ins but also for scanning barcodes of particular products on promotion. Carrying out these activites gives the user points, which they can spend on anything from charity donations to…the new Sex and the City DVD.

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This is the concluding post of our intern Rob Meiklejohn’s project researching the usage of social media platforms in academia.

Previously I’ve looked at some innovative small-scale uses of social media (here) and one rather disappointing attempt to translate these early successes into a single international social media platform (here). So far I’ve been forced me to conclude that in recent years a plateau has been reached. It seems that the vast majority of academics who are inclined to start blogging, join Twitter or create online spaces for students have already done so. The question is; what would be needed for a social media platform to take the next step and turn into the essential tool and daily necessity it is so quickly becoming in other sectors?

There are four key areas any potential academic social media platform would do well to consider. Brace yourselves, things are about to get hypothetical…

Issues of privacy

A common problem for brands venturing into social media is mustering up the courage to fully launch into a large, scary digital space over which they do not have full control. For many in academia the same is true. Despite the huge potential for social media to change peer review and the ways in which academic work is researched, written and distributed, fears about reputation and plagiarism remain. Nowhere is this truer than for academic works-in-progress; the very things most needing the rapid feedback social media can so brilliantly deliver. For this reason any social media alternative to the traditional ‘research seminar’ (the reading of a work-in-progress to peers and collating feedback) would need high levels of customisable privacy. It may not be the Web 2.0 dream of unlimited knowledge sharing but it is a necessary step, at least at initially, in getting serious amounts of academic work researched and shaped within a social media space.

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In my previous blog post I looked at two examples of interesting, localised uses of social media in academia. Now it is time to widen the focus and question whether or not social media successes within the academic sphere are achievable on a global scale. I’m going to look at the troubling case of the social networking platform Academia.edu and analyse where it went wrong by looking at the smaller success story of the Academic Jobs Wiki.

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