Thursday 4 February 2016

Be The Digital Change

As a supporter of the UK Digital Citizenship Summit I received an update from the #DigCitSummit founder Marialice Curran and thought I'd share how this event is living the hashtag of "Be the Digital Change"

Here's a summary of some of the projects and activity since the event on the 23rd January.

Collaborative Sponsorship
Not only was this event crowdsourced in two months but it also saw various groups come together to collaborate to share their resources, contacts and time... but there was collaboration with the sponsors too.

To give just one example, it was Dr John McAlaney who kindly agreed to host the event at Bournemouth University who put Marialice in touch with Dave Shepherd at Barclays bank who, in turn (and with permission), passed Dave's contact details on in case there were any projects that may be of interest to them.

Word of Mouth Referrals & Social Selling 
A number of strong educator/supplier relationships have been established as a result of this event. Companies have assisted in various ways whether with time, advice or financial support and has led to greater collaboration. 

Since first hearing the suggestion that cold calling was dead and that inbound marketing, social selling and content marketing would be the alternative I've explored these ideas and as "Five Business Trends to Watch in 2016" highlights, this is on the way.

Social platforms are making major moves to enable social selling with original brand content, businesses will have to deepen and expand their message... Here are some survey findings one social selling company recently assembled on activity in the sector.

  • 79% of salespeople who use social media outsell those who don't.
  • 53% of buyers said they listen to peer recommendations before they make a purchase.
  • 65% of buyers feel the vendor’s content had an impact on their final purchase decision.
These trends will continue to grow. Thought leadership content - from blog posts to videos - that create a sense of authenticity and excitement among consumers will only become more crucial. Businesses with the most compelling, original vocies will rise above the noise.

There is a wide range of opinions about vendors and the edu/supplier relationship and from a Digital Citizenship perspective it's great to see some promising early results with savvy and ethical engagement with educators and these suppliers to see if social engagement can replace (or reduce) cold calls to educators.
#Save140
Nurph and Chat Salad founder Neil Cauldwell highlighted that Twitter is currently revising the 140 character limit and making this 10,000 words, which could have quite an impact on Twitter chats. Neil and Marialice encouraged people to follow @Save140 and for people to share their thoughts on the #Save140 hashtag.

DigCit Chat
As a result of my involvement with the #DigCitSummitUK and my experiences with other community projects I was delighted to be invited to consult with Marialice and other #DigCit Chat moderators to help grow the number of UK and international followers, as well as to test some new ideas.

The moderators are currently consulting with old and new #DigCit chat participants and advocates to identify the best day/time for the chat. Please feel free to input into this consultation via the following link: http://buff.ly/1SMt5Mk

DigCitSummits
There appear to be enquiries from 7 people and organisations from 5 countries looking to organise and host summits since the event last month.

New Bloggers
Finally there was news that the summit had encouraged two students to take the plunge and hit the "publish" button on their first blog post. I remember how nervous I was about sending my first post out well.Here's Theresa and Helen's post about the event: http://wp.me/p79ZHV-Q.

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