Category Archives: Social media

General update, Social media

Extra interaction

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There’s been some wonderful comments on the blog, between the PageRank upgrade, my increased frequency of blogging, and the inlinks from the BBC. Thanks to everyone for getting involved; from Outcasts fans from Australia and the USA upset about the show cancellation, Apprentice fans in the UK and beyond offering interesting insights on entrepreneurship, to my friends and family getting stuck into the various other discussions that have kicked off. Many thanks.

Thanks to those who’ve got in touch offline too – via Facebook and email. Really interesting and entertaining to be able to flex my brain in different directions like this.

I’ve got a new blogging project in development, which will take some of the more technical content off this blog, which I think would be good for most regular readers.

More on this later…

Internet, Social media

Google nonplussed

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googleplusIt looks good and has some very slick features, but until it opens to the general public and we get a sense if anyone cares, it’s really difficult to tell if Google’s new social network, Google+, is going to be a useful digital platform for me. Right now, it feels a little Google Wave did – slick, pretty, but ultimately without use, and giving me one too many social networks to manage.

That said, the fundamentals are really solid – working around circles of contacts so that privacy controls should be easier to maintain (not that I’ve found those yet).

More to follow, inevitable. Thanks @qwghlm for the invite.

Social media

Top social media tools #smday

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As today is apparently "social media day" and as I’ve done this meme before, I thought I’d give a quick update on my most indispensable social media resources, with a little bit on how, why and where I use them. Note: not all of them are social media platforms, necessarily, but they all help me connect or interact with the social web in some sense or the other.

My blogging toolkit

Evernote is my ultimate offline note-taker. The fact it syncs back into the web and maintains consistency across my many devices (3x personal PCs, 1x work PC, 1x personal Mac, iPhone & iPad) makes it persistently and pervasively useful. Most of my blog posts are drafted in Evernote on the train commute into the office.

Google Reader – is my RSS compendium. I share stories on here (which syndicate out to Twitter and Buzz) and read hundreds of stories a day without spending hundreds of hours a day browsing through multiple websites.

Flickr – for sharing and sourcing images. Enough said – love its embed capabilities.

Windows Live Writer – for editing, polishing and publishing the blog posts. One of the last vital bits of Microsoftware I use.

WordPress – what you see here. Love it – equipped especially with Jetpack, and backed up by Google Analytics, it lets me share, disqus, and keep tabs on what people are reading. Also use it for a number of clients.

I’m still in two minds about Tumblr.

My research tools

Quora is a remarkable resource for finding out expert insights into products, people or brands. There’s a fantastic amount of valuable content on there and its appeared remarkably quickly. I owe a h/t to Tim for pointing me at this earlier this year.

Google Realtime (alongside Google News, Trends, Blogsearch and beyond) are awesome for figuring what’s going on in the world and testing the validity of a perceived trend, finding out what people are talking about etc.

Oh, and Wikipedia, of course.

My comms and productivity portfolio

Google Docs – is my productivity and collaboration powerhouse. I love Apps too.

Chrome – my browsing masterpiece, complete with Tweetdeck (tying together Facebook, Buzz and Twitter)

Skype – the iPhone app is beautifully deployed, although the desktop app has become bloated

Dropbox – ultimate tool for sharing large files, collaborating on projects

Twitter – I struggle to find as much time as I did to keep up with people but dip in every now and then and use it to let people know when I’ve written about them elsewhere

Facebook – for all that people hate it, I do think its boss, and one of the most powerful tools for me to keep in touch with people. Emily’s life is catalogued in pictures on there, and I rely on its ‘closed’ nature to maintain a certain level of privacy (aware of the irony here).  I’m v. curious about Google+ though.

My health check

RunKeeper and DailyBurn are my apps of choice on this front, providing fitness monitoring and tracking and diet monitoring and tracking respectively. Now if only they talked to each other…

Mobile+

Camera+ fits into this thanks to its awesome sharing features. I use mobile apps for Evernote, Tweetdeck, WordPress, Skype and a few others, but this is the stand-out social app.

Right, phew, more than I thought. What do you use that I’m missing? What do I use that you think is rubbish?

Current affairs, Media & Marketing, Social media

French gov’t bans mentions of social networks by name on radio

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I love this:

How do you say Facebook and Twitter in French? You don’t – at least, not if you are on radio or television, where French officials have banned any mention of them unless they are specifically part of the story.

Conspiracy theorists springing up all over the place as to why they’ve done it; the rationale makes a kind of sense to me, however – it’s in the spirit of fairness, so as to not discriminate against other lesser, commercial social networks. Even if its total rubbish, I love that sentiment. There’s something very colonial about it, and I’m surprised the British (given the other strictures at the BBC about supporting commercial organisations) haven’t tried it ("that anti-competition stuff, old boy, it’s simply not cricket.")

At least, force broadcasters to mention (and have a presence on) every other social network in the spirit of fairness. It’d take a week…

Shopping, Social media

Interaction with brands on Twitter

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Twitter logoI’ve tweeted at a few brands recently to satisfy my blog-curiosity about one thing or the other. @amazonuk to ask about packaging,  @mini to point out that its website wasn’t working properly in Chrome, @duracelluk to ask about its AA battery charger, @qwertee_com to let them know about my t-shirt review (and give them an opportunity to defend the quality of the cotton) and possibly one or two other media programmes (the Apprentice, Game of Thrones et al).

Now I know that the media programmes will be inundated with mentions, and perhaps even Amazon might get more tweets than it could cope with, but Mini was the only company to get back to me. The theory of having a direct connection to a business is a good one but it seems that not everyone is coping as well with providing an outlet to direct interaction as you’d hope.

I think brands should stick a disclaimer up there if the account isn’t monitored, or if people don’t intend to respond. It’s only fair to set expectations…. You can understand why even slightly arbitrary studies like this one come to the conclusions that they do… Or maybe it’s that – as a mere customer and a PageRank 2 blog writer – I don’t merit their attention…

Miscellany, Social media

How to be a prolific blogger

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People have asked me how I’m being so prolific on the blog. Well, other than the fact I have 2 hours on a train most days and have the time to tap out thoughts, here’s what I’m doing – three broadly practical and three psychological things:

  1. Making quick notes on Evernote every time a post idea occurs – on a PC, Mac or iPhone
  2. Capturing and clipping links in both Evernote and Google Reader
  3. Blogging in plain text in Evernote (on a Mac), then publishing using Windows Live Writer, pulling shareable images from Flickr or elsewhere to illustrate the stories and adding additional links

Psych

  1. Being more curious in conversations with colleagues, friends and strangers
  2. Picking and choosing which posts I want to build out and research in full as I go
  3. Forcing myself to write as often as I can so I don’t build up any kind of weird blogging self-consciousness

The readership of the blog has gone up substantially since last December – averaging just over 200 visits a day – and I’m enjoying the occasional interaction in the comments as well as the increased store of knowledge I’m getting on all things. Tony Buzan was right – adults aren’t curious enough – but having a blog to write seems to fuel that thirst for knowledge, and maybe I’ll be able to keep up with my daughter…

Dadblogging, Media & Marketing, Miscellany, Social media

Baby social media management services

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Chris (and Tom and Damian) came to visit this weekend, and as is inevitable when {heavy irony} social media gurus {/heavy irony} come together, we brainstormed new business concepts.

Well, maybe not entirely new, but ‘Baby Social Media Management’ seemed a concept worth exploring, so we checked if http://emi.ly was available (it wasn’t, already registered to some doting Bavarian dad, apparently) and considered other stratagems for maximising my 7-month-old daughter’s social graph. Knowem seems particularly well named for my daughter’s use…

As part of this discussion, Chris pointed me at this case study – which, needless to say, is dynamic, interactive, synergistic, integrated social media success.

Pink pony integrated marketing campaign ftw
Social media

My personal social media syndication strategy

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The blog is connected to the… Twitter… The Twitter’s connected to the… Google Buzz… The Google Buzz is connected to the Facebook… and somewhere it all ends up a mess.

Inspired by this new WordPress feature, I’ve been trying to work out how to best link my various social sharing tools so that people can keep up with me as they’d like to. Here’s where I’ve ended up by way of automatic syndication / cross posting:

1) My blogs (this one and LSR) syndicate to Twitter, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and my Facebook page

2) My Google Reader shared items (interesting news stories I’ve seen around the web) syndicate to Twitter, and Google Buzz

3) Twitter syndicates to nowhere; if you’d like to keep up with my Tweets, follow me. I don’t think I’ve even connected it to LinkedIn.

4) Flickr syndicates to Facebook and Google Buzz (although I use it less and less these days)

5) I don’t pay attention to FriendFeed, Quora, MySpace, FourSquare, YouTube, Friendster or any of the half-dozen or so other, less useful to me social venues. But who knows, someday I may do.

6) Gyminee / Dailyburn may become useful again once I restart the diet and the half-marathon training, and Runkeeper probably needs integrating somewhere – it does automatically post to Facebook.

If the world understood and used RSS readers I’d be less concerned about all of this, but given that not all of you do, I’m going with this approach. Hopefully its focussed enough and there isn’t so much overlap its annoying.

I need a personal social media strategy? Who knew!?

What do you do to simplify the share/follow experience for your friends/fans/family?

Books, Media & Marketing, Social media

Raymond E Feist backlist – thanks, Voyager!

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Who says nobody wins online competitions? I entered a competition from Voyager Books, which I learned of via their e-newsletter (sign up here) and last month received a large box of books from the publishers with Raymond E Feist’s entire backlist! Of course, as a loyal fan I already have many of these but there’s a few titles I was missing and it’ll make a great gift… Pics may follow when I’ve finished sorting out boiler issues.

Thanks to Voyager, and do sign up if you’re an SF / Fantasy fans (the next competition will let you win Robin Hobb’s backlist, which I read my way through earlier this year). They also give a bunch of good stuff away via their Twitter handle, but I’ve not had the good fortune to win there…