SIPA UK Blog

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

Kinda cool or pretentious self-indulgence?

Talking of avatars and creating an alternate identity for the online world (because we all need one of those, right?), I stumbled across this great site that helps you do exactly that.

If, like me, you've ever wondered how Shel Holtz or Lee Smith came up with cartoon-like adaptations of themselves for their blogs, look no further.

For the modest sum of $40-$50, you too can have a cartoon-portrait done of your self at IconizeMe.com

But which is it? Kinda cool or pretentious self-indulgence?

I don't know about you, but perhaps no-one's life is complete without one. Or should I just get out more?

Anyway, I'll show you mine if you show me yours! I'm off to spend a hard-earned $40.

Robin Crumby (cartoon-likeness pending).

Are social networks just a flash in the pan?

An interesting piece this week appears on The Atlantic implying that the growth of social networks have all the hallmarks of being a gold rush, reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.

In the article titled 'The Web 2.0 Bubble', Michael Hirshorn writes that:

In the Web hype-o-sphere, things matter hugely until, very suddenly, they don’t matter at all. Thanks to the unprecedented growth of MySpace and Facebook, “social media” matters hugely right now, but it is likely only another in a long string of putatively disruptive, massively hyped technologies that prove just one more step in the long march.

He's right in pointing out that social media has been around since the early days of the commercial web with sites like Geocities proving popular in building niche communities of like-minded users.

Suddenly, everyone 'needs' a social network to support their brand online. But do they really and how many of these will fall flat within months? Time will tell.

There are already social network floozies with more links and 'friends' than seems feasible. The article names the dubiously dubbed 'Tila Tequila' as the most popular with 1.5 million friends on MySpace

So, back in the business world, should we skip social networks and wait for the next bus to come along?Never have to wait long in Web 2.0 for the next fad.

I say no. Business social networks give most of us, not all of us, the chance to make the communities  that already exist around our brands more efficient. They are perhaps unlikely to create community where none existed before. Human networks exist in lots of unusual places. Even accountants like to network, improbable as it sounds. So online social networks just allow this to happen quicker.

But as Michael Hirshorn concludes, there are soon to be so many of these social networks, that fatigue will set in fast. People will either be forced to make choices about where they invest time in uploading profiles to either the most generic or the most niche, depending on your purpose. So there will be opportunities for entrepreneurs to link the networks together to be searchable (already some sites are starting to do this, like Wink, Minggl or Social Grapes).

Surely, it's just a little early to be writing off social networks while they're still in their infancy? Perhaps the mainstream generic sites will start to peak, but the niche sites are just getting started. People are still figuring out where these tools fit into the mix.

IBM and Cisco are smart operators. They certainly wouldn't be investing millions in developing business grade social networking applications. Would they?

Robin Crumby.

The perils of blogging and libel laws

Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of marketing services giant WPP, was in the London's High Court yesterday suing two former associates over a "bitterly hostile" campaign against him and his Italian chief operating officer, Daniela Weber via blog posts and e-mail.

It is alleged that Sorrell and Ms Weber were described as:

"the mad dwarf and the nympho schizo"

This is the first high-profile libel case in the UK to focus on comments made on a blog and the full report of the case can be found in today's Financial Times

According to the article, it follows a bitter press campaign against WPP by employees of FullSix. A lawyer acting for FullSix's Mr Benatti told a counterpart at WPP that the executive 'would be devoting the next few years to destroying Sir Martin and WPP.'

It again goes to show the importance of blogging guidelines for all staff, as reported in this week's issue of Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter. With examples given from IBM and Sun Microsystems.

As IBM rightly say:  Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time.

Robin Crumby