Everyone’s Blogging
July 21, 2008
These slides from the training session for the Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce last week. Let me know if you want us to come to your event or run a bespoke event or Masterclass.
More details on our Social Media for Good course soon (looks like next date will be Oct 3 in Brighton).
Covers a bit of an introduction to social media and blogging, plus some questions to get you thinking about your own context, opportunities and challenges.
Some good thinking in the room and animated conversations. Quite a few organisations ready to get blogging and exploring integrated social media in more depth.
A few of you made pledges are you walked out the door about your goals and intentions, so let me know how you get on!
Thanks to all for your warm feedback and to those who helped make it a positive event, especially Lorraine Bell (BCP), Tania “Radiance” Fullerton (Brighton Steiner School) and Fay McDonald.
Email Marketing Masterclass
July 17, 2008
| 21 August, 2008 | ||
| 6:30 pm | to | 8:30 pm |
One of our special Nodestone colleagues Mr Jim Callender is running a session soon that can’t be missed. Well, except by us as we will be swanning around in France having a well earned break!
For those of you who will be around, do get along. Email is one of the most tried and true, low cost and high response online marketing / social media tools to use. Do it well, and it might even go viral.
Jim will be co-presenting with the now-famous pure360 - total email marketing solution people. Great resources available on their site.
Thursday 21st August, 18:30 - 20:30
Payment by donation to The Werks.
Full details and register here.
Twitter stumbles, and there goes the neighbourhood
July 13, 2008
Witness the emotional committment of Twitter users. Wow, people love it, really want this thing to work, and really love to moan about it as the fail whale displays more and more often.
Twitter looks back on track after a shaky few days back there, which shows that all is not well in microblogging land, and there’s something wrong with the microblogging model, but that’s a topic to take up later.
Having Twitter get slow, turn off features, or just not respond has started to get really annoying. We’re inclined to include Twitter as an emerging tool to use to build and attract community. But without stability, it’s not going to work predictably . How can we recommend building twitter into a social media campaign? Well, we can’t really. Or we have to accept Twitter as a somewhat flaky, sometimes useful tool.
And worse, with Twitter going up and down, there goes the neighbourhood. People pick up and leave to one of the fifty other microblogging services that are growing up in the shadow of twitter and waiting for users to fall out of the Twitter tree.
Trouble. We’re never going to find each other if we’re spread across tens of different services.
But then again, we want Twitter, in its lovely cuteness, to work. But that makes it a monopoly with a secret or currently secret business model.
Tricky.
So, my big needs in microblogging are:
- I want something reliable that works
- I want something that accesses most people (that want to be involved)
- I want it to be long term sustainable, not a monoculture or monopoly with a secret business model
To meet these three, we’re going to need to do some internet-level architecture work to support microblogging and ambient status. Basically, we’re going to need to:
- Develop some standards for microblogging messaging
- Develop standard ways to connect microblogging services together
- Allow users to migrate from one service to another easily– and use more than one service at once
- Ensure some level of reliability in messsaging
- Make sure the whole thing can scale up to the current level of global SMS usage and beyond
This looks a lot like what we have for the internet email architecture. It took a long time to get organised, and it has some problems, but it is a mostly universal service with lots of servers, providers and clients.
There are a bunch of people talking about these sorts of standardisation. I’ll review the efforts in a later post and see where we are headed. My guess this is going to take a while and we are going to have some early-adopter pain in the meantime.
Key point: At some point Twitter is going to have to open up and interwork with other microblogging services. And that is the moment, in my opinion, when they will really succeed.
Why I Love Social Media
July 8, 2008
Sometimes (like now) I am up late tapping away, when I could be back in bed with Ian McEwan - or my husband at least. I start wondering why I’m so big on this social media stuff. Well here’s a response I wrote to a post on Will McInnes’ blog that reminds me why.
It started a long time ago.
(With a big, loyal nod to my old mate and first boss Errol Considine, then-MD/Owner of Hill & Knowlton Perth - who asked Gra and I to geek up his people in 1997, well before anyone else was starting to get the plot. But he was always a cool guy, and a demon with a red pen.
What’s the web 2.0 equivalent of the editor’s razor sharp twirling red pen, held like The Sword of Damocles over your copy? Note to self: better spell that properly in case he’s discovered Google Alerts, or is it my mother the English teacher haunting me…)
Here’s the original post World Has Changed; PR Agencies Haven’t from Will that spurred us all on, to get stuck in. He says what he means. No bullshit allowed in the Will-osphere, which is rawther refreshing, innit.