… Social Media use at BCM2013

Back in June I was critical of Social Media usage at the Australasian BC Summit, suggesting that one of the reasons why there was no use of social media was the age of attendees. It was not a young audience.

If we did not make an issue of the need to use social media  at the time of a disruption it probably would not matter – but we do and at the same time when we don’t practice, nor understand, it.

The audience at BCI World Conference in London last week was not much younger – it is still an older person’s discipline. But there was a little more use of Social Media. But still remarkably disappointing – especially as there had been good promotion of the Twitter hashtag (unlike the Australasian conference) and clear exhortation to people to join discussion on social media.

The primary social media tools in use were blogs (primarily the BCEye) and Twitter. Anybody can look at the BCEye and see there is no engagement – nobody comments, so we can discount that medium.

I extracted the Twitter stream for the conference (#BCM2013, which is embedded at the bottom of this post) and did some analysis;

• 199 messages – after you cull the Milan book show, the Majorca dance party and another event in the USA that used the same hashtag
  • Note to Andrew Scott for next year – search to see what is being used before picking a hashtag
• First I discounted the advertising, I am not interested in Twitter use for sales and marketing, only Twitter use for BC practitioners.
  • That eliminated 59 messages, or 30% of the stream
  • There is perhaps an argument that could be mounted about the “Signal to Noise” ratio – and this rate of advertising may put many off using the medium in the first place.
• Next I eliminated all the chat related to the awards and dinner
  • Another 26 messages, or 13%
  • A lot could be said about our engagement with ideas compared to engagement with a party
• Next I looked at the dates and pretty much everything pre-conference was promotion of the BCEye blog posts, and there was no engagement with these, so culled them also
  • A further 39 messages, or 20%
• That left me with 77 messages, or 39% of the total message stream as being of interest – in terms of usage of this medium by BC practitioners to share and engage.

The first, and most obvious, result is that there appears to be zero engagement from people outside the conference. Which would have been one of the primary hopes for using these tools. The time zone difference may have been an issue, but people can still engage in their own time zone and hopefully there may have been responses.

Looking at the data stream for the conference, 64% contains non-specific ideas, not really a comment or idea to engage with. Examples would be “Was a good day”, “having a great conference” – tweets that simply do not offer any reason or intent to engage.

• 14% offered ideas and comments from/during the Keynote sessions
• 22% offered similar content from the Stream sessions
• these are messages that we could hope to generate discussion and comment

As far as I can see only 2 of these messages generated a response or subsequent engagement. Out of 199 messages, 2 demonstrated engagement with ideas.

I can see there are another 3 messages that constitute discussion – but if all we can use the tool for is to thank people for liking the day, then we have a long way to go.

Full marks to Andrew Scott from the BCI for encouraging the idea of social media, and for practicing what he preached during the conference. Hopefully there will be more people engaged next time, in the interim there are a lot of UK-only workshops – perhaps they would be a place to practice.

Here is the Top 10, and note that these 10 account for 81% of the useful message stream.

If we want things to change we need to change our practices – be they the old-school BCM practices or the use of Social Media.

It won’t happen by magic – we all have to do something differently.

If you are interested you can download my worksheet here and play with the data yourself, it is an Excel file.
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