Everyone’s Blogging

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

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.

That set of faces, top left: FaceMap

For the new nodestone banner, I made a little application that goes and builds that set of faces that you see on the top-left banner of the nodestone.com. This post is all about the why and how of that.

We were looking for a way to visually represent the human nature of social media. We’ve got the nice, nodey logo, but where are the people? All the people. All the faces, so that leads us to a bunch of avatars or icons with people’s faces.

Now there is a facebook app called FriendGrid which goes some way there:

But, too big and not enough faces for what we are looking for.  We needed something wide to fill that banner space.  Also, those question marks send the wrong message, no?

So, then, how hard is it to get that set of avatars photos, scale em down and place them in a single image?   Not hard at all, it turns out.

I turned to Twitter.  Twitter users are prety good at uploading avatars, and accessing them via the API is pretty straightforward, so I wrote a quick app with Google AppEngine to accept a twitter username and password and then fetch the avatar URLs and display them in a block.  It worked nicely, so I meddled with the display of the images, got them in a suitable sized block in a browser and screen captured them. I used the Gimp to manipulate the image a bit and make the fractured right hand end. Done.

Next features I’ll add:

• Add more source twitter IDs, so the starting set can be our friends, not my friends.
• Follow friends of friends until we have enough unique faces, this avoiding duplicates
• Remove the ‘no avatar’ images
• Do the actual image manipulation to build a single image from all these.
• Auto-update the nodestone banner once a week or something as friends change,

Sometime over summer I’ll tidy up and publish the app over to AppEngine and let you all know.

Social Media for the Third Sector

Learning Package: Social Media for the Third Sector

New dates coming soon…

Your chance to get > share > use radical knowledge for positive impact. More information…