SIPA UK Blog

SIPA's Online Publishing & Marketing Conference - Nov 19, London

Resurrecting the SIPA UK blog to let you know that we have a fantastic event coming up next month in London.

I wrote a piece about it on my personal blog recently so rather than repeating myself please just link over here to see the full details of the programme and speakers. 

Hope you'll be able to join us there.

Rory.

In an online world is 'content still king'?

The final panel of the day at the SIPA Congress last week debated whether content was still king. I am running an open question on LinkedIn at the moment - feel free to contribute or leave a comment here with your thoughts.

Rory.

The flip side to a Facebook crackdown

By Alex Manchester, Melcrum

Hi all,

Rob Crumby has invited me to guest blog on the SIPA UK blog, so here goes...

It's easy enough to go about banning Facebook in the workplace because of productivity fears. This typical, generalising policy is in place in many organisations and there are numerous pieces of "research" to help justify your actions. But, is Facebook really a problem? And, looking at it another way, what are the ramifications of banning Facebook?

If the latest survey from Telindus is to be believed (see the Melcrum Internal Comms Hub news story here), some 39% of workers aged between 18-24 would consider quitting their jobs if their employer put a full ban on social networking sites - and 80% of the 1,000 surveyed do access such sites at work.

In a clear statement to employers wondering what to do, almost half of workers believe it would be better to restrict personal internet usage to lunch or out of work hours, rather than ban access completely. Surely this is a better option than banning it outright?

Shel Holtz has another angle on this continuing story, which over on The Melcrum Blog we've covered a lot in the last 18 months. According to the latest analysis from the US Labour Department – and despite rapid growth in Facebook's popularity (did you see it recently matched and surpassed MySpace as the biggest social network? See image below) – productivity in the US has actually increased faster than expected in the first quarter of 2008. That's despite lots of job cuts, a horrible economic climate and lots of uncertainty - and millions of workers having access to Facebook/the Web at work.

According to many consultants and pundits, wasn't Facebook going to cost businesses billions in lost productivity? Yup, that's what quite a few said. (Example 1 and Example 2 for starters.).

So, what's the deal here?

Telling Sky News Online, Telindus managing director, Mark Hutchinson said, "The key to appreciating the younger generation is to understand that they communicate in a totally different way. To have a phone on your desk is alien, they use YouTube and Facebook on a daily basis."

Exactly, and that comment also reminds me of a recent quote at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum from David Backley, CTO at Westpac (one of the four major banks in Australia): "People coming into the workplace are not demanding these tools [social networking, blogs, IM etc], they're actually expecting them to be available."

IT departments are scared of social media. Businesses are scared, (as they were when the individual telephone on a desk was introduced, as Shel Holtz often says). But in the long term, by putting heads in the sand and creating a nice iron curtain around your employees, your company is going to look quite unappealing next to the competitor who is making more of an effort to understand the increasingly varied demands of the 100% networked employee. All you're actually doing is demonstrating a complete lack of understanding about this new "stuff".

Conversation, dialogue, social networking, blogs, personal sites, personal publishing, easy-to-use software... this is how things are going. We're not going to go back to how things were 10, 5 or even 2 years ago.

It's wise to consider the threats and risks, but you should spend an equal amount of time weighing up the opportunities and potential advantages, because you can keep pining for the "good ol' days", or you can wake up and smell the internet coffee.

Facebook's rise and usurping of MySpace as the world's #1 social networking site (image via Tech Crunch)

Virtual friends?

Right. I've had enough of this debate about how it's good to meet people face to face.

I agree.

It is.

But this is interesting & I plan on playing with the technology behind it - Ning.

Folio Media Pro

My name is Rory Brown and I am a geek.

When customers say thank you

"I flew all the way for this!"

With oil at $130 plus a barrel. Increased security checks. And corporate budgets under pressure. Traveling to business conferences just to hear a bunch of speakers read out bullet points from PowerPoint slides, when improved communication and social media mean you could have listened in from the comfort of your office...All this is really raising the bar for conference organizers. Or so says author of Permission Marketing, Seth Godin.

Anyone who's ever read his white paper on 'Death by Powerpoint': Really Bad Powerpoint will have looked back and cringed at their own slide decks crammed packed full of bullet points and dense text that has delegates' minds wandering or plain squinting at the screen.

The days of the traditional format conference are surely numbered. But from roundtables, to Q&A sessions, to interactive group discussions, to plain-old networking in the halls, there's no substitute for the shared learning experience conferences offer, when done well.

So imagine our delight when a delegate at Melcrum's recent Employee Engagement Summit in Sydney, Australia took it upon themselves to buy our very own Amy Lyons the most enormous bouquet of flowers with a card that referenced all the wonderful things Amy had done to make their conference experience second to none. (Customer service smug factor: 10/10).

It would seem that the value of attending conferences is alive and well, after all. And can social media and so-called 'virtual conferences' really replace the real thing? Virtual flowers, anyone?

By Robin Crumby, Managing Director, Melcrum

Twitter ye not?

Whenever I talk about Twitter my fellow committee members tend to laugh. I must admit that when I first came across the service about 6 months ago I was baffled and couldn't see the point. But now I am starting to..

For those who have not come across Twitter the basic concept is that it is a 'micro-blogging' platform. Users register accounts and then decide whose tweets they want to follow. The principle is very similar to instant messaging but instead of your messages being one-to-one they are one to how ever many people chose to follow you in return.

Now, this could all be viewed as a massive time suck. And it can be. But there are some interesting business applications - especially in the marketing and information sectors in which I currently work. I'll list a few of them:

1. Speaker recruitment. We have recently recruited several speakers for events as a result of pitching calls for papers on Twitter. They have either been recommended by people who have heard them speak in other places or pitched themselves.
2. Feedback. if hosting events you can set up a 'Twitter tag' where your delegates can post questions to the panel or give feedback on sessions via their laptops or mobile phones. It is also great for co-ordinating where the best parties are!
3. Reputation management. I guarantee that somewhere people are talking about your brands or competitors.Twitter posts don't currently show up in search engine results but you can search for posts by using specific search engines like Summize or Tweetscan.
4. The news finds you. My news consumption habits are changing. From reading a lot of magazines, to e-mail newsletters, to RSS feeds; my biggest source of information is now referred by my network. The people I trust and who have similar interests to me flag up things of interest and often people at the fringes of my networks prompt those slightly peripheral thoughts from other industries that develop into great ideas.
5. Driving traffic to websites. We now have Twitter channels for some of our major news sites - like ClickZ. Users of Twitter chose to follow the channel and  then get instant messages when new content is posted.
6. Product / supplier recommendations. I recently bought a new Asus eee pc laptop totally based on recommendations I received from people I trust on Twitter. The same principle applies when trying to source suppliers or products for your business.

I mentioned Twitter at SIPA's great "How to make money from online content" session last Thursday [if you weren't there you missed a great session & well done Lindsey Greig for organising], a quick poll showed that no-one in the audience was using it. That's a shame. While there will probably be a new fad along any moment I would urge all publishers to try these tools. You have to be operating in the new digital world if you want to really understand how everything fits together and how your business might need to adapt in the future.

www.twitter.com/rorybrown

New SIPA UK group set up on Facebook

Following an enthusiastic show of hands at the latest SIPA UK E-marketing conference a couple of weeks back, I have now set up a Facebook group for SIPA UK members.

This is the Facebook group for UK specialised information publishers, large and small, to discuss their challenges, share ideas and network with their peers.

If you are already a Facebook member, you can find the group at: SIPA UK Facebook group

Alternatively, you can join the rest of the world's population on Facebook by signing up now.

Although, I would be first to admit that take-up amongst Melcrum staff has been slow. Why? Because, a lot of people see Facebook as a place for friends. But those divides between work and play are tumbling down. After all, is work a place you go to each day, or something you do?

With more of us working remotely, social media brings colleagues and friends closer together.

But what do you think? Is Facebook a tool for business too?

Robin

Blogs & Social Media Forum

Yesterday the newly acquired VNU division of Incisive Media hosted our 2nd Blogs & Social Media Forum. It was a fantastic event which, unfortunately, I only managed to stay for the morning of.

Some of the key takeaways for me were:

1) The use of blogging and social media technology within all of our businesses is no longer a 'nice to have' or a whizzy geeky add on. Blogs are mainstream communication channels and when used properly can generate significant marketing and search exposure.

2) The prevalence and reach of blogs will continue to put pressure on paid content. One of my colleagues in the US always uses the phrase that content 'wants to be free'. The new waves of citizen journalism and efficient distribution mechanisms mean that it is increasingly hard to compete on (and charge for) news.

3) Embracing blogs, social media and user generated content means giving up large elements of control. This is a very uncomfortable things for larger corporates to do - especially when they are public companies. The view of the panelists was that you had to accept mistakes will be made and content will be posted that you'd prefer wasn't.

4) The software to implement some of this technology is cheap. The Economist were using a service called Pluck. It was the same service that USA Today had implemented in a fundamental revamp of how their news was displayed. Look at the way in which they embed personalisation, recommendation and feedback into every element of their new site.

One final point made by Ben Edwards, the Publisher of Economist.com was that in order to get momentum behind blogs an element of compulsion was important. He set minimum posting guidelines for everyone on the team who contributed - maybe a lesson for us here at SIPA UK?

Rory Brown, Incisive Media.

Miss it - miss out

So having made bold claims about writing 'live' from the conference, I failed miserably. Too busy scribbling down ideas to share them. And oh-so quick, I am now home again after a whirlwind tour.

There were a pitiful number of Brits in attendance. Less than 5, compared to more than 35 from Germany and VNR, courtesy of Helmut Graf's hard work. The consensus is that the June 27 UK SIPA event is too close to the Washington International conference, forcing people to choose on both sides of the Atlantic.

The key themes of the event and the challenges rearing their ugly heads were:

1. What does user-generated content mean for the paid content model? How do you mesh them together and make money from social networks, blogs and podcasts?
2. Google: great presentation from their head of content partnerships showcasing how specialised publishers can get better visibility for their content and better results.
3. Online training: going beyond audio conferences and webinars to deliver certified training programmes.

I will write up my stuff and share some of the highlights at the SIPA London event on June 27th. See you there.

Robin.

Time to SEO yourself

I suspected it was only a matter of time...

2 weeks ago I had a conversation with an old friend from university. He was expecting his third child and was struggling with names. He'd been through all this before but now was viewing the process differently. After naming his first daughter with what he thought was a really unique and quirky name he turned up on the first day of her nursery class to discover that four other sets of parents had thought the same thing. How could he have been so common and unoriginal?

We discussed a few of the truly ridiculous names that some parents give and he said he was leaning down this route because "at least in the future when someone searched for her in Google she would stand out" (the family had a top-10 surname as well).

This is the first instance I know of someone naming a child with a search engine at the forefront of their mind but I'm sure it won't be the last. Big brands spend millions on managing their identity, image and ranking online because, increasingly, a search engine box is their first touchpoint with the consumer.

But take a moment to think about your own personal brand. When you do an ego search online what information comes up? Thousands of other John Smiths (including the beer)? A MySpace entry from your friends about a wild night out in Magaluf? A YouTube video? Think about the impression that this gives of 'brand me' because I guarantee you that employers and headhunters are starting to look online as part of the recruitment process.

Time to optimise youself online

So, what lessons should we learn from the search engine optimisation industry? What gets you higher up the rankings and gives you a higher profile? The two most important factors are:

1. Content - post information about yourself online but manage it carefully. Set up accounts with chosen social networking site. Services like LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace. Think about keywords you want to be found for and make sure they are included.
2. Links - join your industry's trade associations. Participate in meetings. Speak at conferences. Write on discussion boards, blogs and journals for your industry. Give quotes in your company press releases. Network. And provide somewhere to link back to your own personal website, your blog or a LinkedIn page.

It is time to spend some time controlling your personal profile online.

Alternatively, you could choose to change your name by deedpoll and hope that 1,000 other Louise White's have more to hide than you do...

Rory Brown, Incisive Media