We have been busy at NM Towers with the help of our friends at Hotwire contributing to articles and generally getting ourselves and our opinions out and about on the social media scene.
Here is a round up of the recent press we have been contributing to since the New Year; I hope you find this interesting, please feel free to comment.
Jan-09 – Revolution Magazine – ‘Social Networks Must Prove Their Worth’
Will’s comment in response to the call for social networks to prove their worth to investors and advertisers in 2009…
- What does 2009 hold for social networks?
- Is it a case of monetise or die?
- Have social networks mistakenly focussed on growing their user base rather than generating revenue?
02-02-09 – BBC Radio 4 – iPM
Jenni was interviewed for a Radio 4 podcast featuring passionate debate from across the web with Eddie Mair. Unfortunately I can not find the sound bite online, however I can give you an overview of what the interview was about below.
As UK workers woke up to several inches of snow on early on a February Monday morning they naturally turned to the web to look for up-to-date weather reports and travel bulletins. With what seemed like the majority of the UK going online at the same time, traditional web sites began to falter and strain under the weight of so many people accessing their data.
Queue the social web and sites that enable dynamic conversation like Twitter. Are these the places that people will turn to in future to get the real time information they need?
04-02-09 – Anna’s comments included in an article for TechRadar.com
On Facebook’s fifth birthday Anna gave her thoughts on how the social network has impacted the internet and how new audiences are being brought online.
Five Years on what is Facebook’s future?
24-02-09 – Will in the Argus
Following on from Will’s now famous interview on the BBC, our local Brighton newspaper; The Argus picked up on the story and ran a nice article about it.
25-02-09 – Letter to the Editor in Marketing Magazine
Will’s response to an article written by Alan Mitchell who wrote an opinion piece suggesting that marketers shouldn’t focus on social networks but should turn their attention to community-based advice sharing websites like moneysavingexpert.com.
Thanks to just.Luc for the photo – http://www.flickr.com/photos/9619972@N08/
Ruth wrote this on 27.02.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Industry news, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Press box
This week’s been great for blogging stories – first Ryan Air gave us a first-class example of how not to engage in the blogosphere, then the medium gets great public recognition courtesy of the George Orwell prize.
When lone blogger Jason Roe posted that he’d got the Ryan Air website to display a flight price of 0.00, he probably didn’t realise he’d end up featured on the Times Online within a week.
But, thanks to a vitriolic and profane response by (a now confirmed) Ryan Air employee, bloggers everywhere have been linking to Jason’s blog.
The result? The number and influence of sites talking about this means that now a Google search for ‘Ryan Air’ brings up the Times Online at number five.
Whether Ryan Air care about this is doubtful, given their official response denouncing ‘idiot’ and ‘lunatic’ bloggers – but it is a great example of the potential effect on brand image when you go about engaging in the conversation in the wrong way.
A polite, or even grateful response might not have got the same coverage (given everyone’s love of a juicy story), but at least it wouldn’t have further cemented the company’s ‘bullish’ (and that’s being polite) image.
On a more positive note, Radio 4’s today programme announced that this year’s George Orwell prize for political writing is featuring a category for political blogs.
It’s a great public endorsement of the medium and recognition of the people behind it as credible writers (rather than idiots or lunatics!).
About time too – as Evan Davis asked this morning – if Orwell was still around today, might he be a blogger?
Max St John wrote this on 26.02.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Blogging, Interesting, NixonMcInnes, Social media box
Yesterday started like any other day at NixonMcInnes; Will was running the ever popular Measurement Camp when he was suddenly pulled aside by our friends at Hotwire and asked if he would like to provide comment on the breaking news that Facebook had decided to change their terms of service and implement an ‘irrevocable’ licence to do exactly what they want with your content. Facebook have now returned to their previous terms of use after tens of thousands of users said it breached their right to privacy. Controversial eh? So controversial that the BBC picked up on the story and invited Will to comment. We naturally, jumped at the opportunity, it’s not every day you get to be on the BBC after all. 15 minutes of fame at last.
So Will had to leave Measurement Camp early (apologies to all of those in attendance and thanks to those who were left to wrap up the morning session) and was whisked over to Television Centre in White City where he was interviewed for the BBC lunchtime news.
Back in Brighton, the NixonMcInnes office and various members of the Twitter community eagerly waited to watch him on the TV.
Check out the Twitter chatter that’s been going on; NB this content is liklely to be out of date in a couple of weeks time.
Such an exciting and memorable day, we simply had to shout about it.
We are very proud of our Will, well done and many thanks goes out to Robin Wilson at McCann Erickson for the lead and to Hotwire for securing the opportunitty and organising Will on the day.
View Will’s stellar performance.
Ruth wrote this on 19.02.09 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Funny, Interesting, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Press, Social networks, User generated content, Web technology box
To mark the release of the new animated movie Coraline, written and directed by Henry Selick, he of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach fame, based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Laika comissioned ad agency Weiden+Kennedy’s Portland studio to come up with a marketing solution with the brief to “Reinvent the way you market a movie.”
They came up with a lot of wonderous stuff, not least the stuff they sent out to bloggers. Instead of, this from personal experience as a recipient, a bunch of hurredly photocopied press releases and crappily presented CD-ROMs filled with useless junk, they sent forth these absolutely exquisite handmade boxes to online influencers, filled with original artifacts from the film itself. Absolute treasures!
How could you not say a good word about these?
(via Drawn!)
Trevor May wrote this on 17.02.09 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Press box
You don’t own you, online.
Not if you is your words, your photos, your comments and updates, and you are one of the 175 million active Facebook users worldwide.
Must normal citizens don’t know this, and some don’t care. Increasingly they/we will, and perhaps very well should.
You see in Facebook’s old Terms of Service – effectively the contract between the users of the service and the providers of the service – if you shut down your account then any rights Facebook had to all of your old content would expire. That seems fair to me.
Prompted by an excellent short piece in The Consumerist, it’s clear that’s changed, and all of those that have continued using the service have by default agreed to the new terms. Uh oh!
Here’s the rights you’ve granted to Facebook – enjoy catching up on what you’ve already agreed to!
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
WOW :)
I love it! It’s like porn for lawyers (these are now my words!).
“OK, put that draft in the bin – I can see where you were going with it but it’s not making my fingers and toes dance. Let’s try a different approach: now I want you to shut your eyes and imagine in your every wish could come true….aha….yup…go with it…imagine if we made all the rules…… go with it, run wild, now slowly open your eyes and just start writing….mmmkay….that’s it..‘irrevocable’ – I love it!!!!…go! GO! WOOOooooo!!!”
Seriously. That is a real masterpiece. A proper piece of work. Genius. It probably only took 10 minutes. They were in flow. It just poured down through the fingers into the keyboard and every wish came true.
I don’t have time right now to write about my feelings and questions on this or the implications but here’s a short bulleted list of thoughts and questions.
- Do real normal people care if every image of them on Facebook will potentially last forever and be in someone else’s control and ownership?
- Is it already less expensive to store a jpeg forever (fractional hosting costs) than to remove an image (fiddly, expert human costs)?
- Therefore is personal content about us like nuclear waste - does it linger on, buried, hidden, malignant and toxic?
- Will this become like every other lag between the company’s knowledge and the consumers’ awareness? (See cigarettes, baby milk, transfattyacids, dangerous batteries, tyres, airline operators, drugs). Will there be a violent backlash when the chickens come home to roost?
- Or do Facebook have a responsibility to cover all of this for reasons we don’t appreciate (like heavy legal obligations like – guessing – terrorism, laundering, Sarbannes-Oxley? @mediaczar suggested this on Twitter in reply to UK Member of Parliament @tom_watson. Is someone else the bad guy really?
- Does it even matter? Maybe war, starvation and disease that ruin millions of lives every day are worse than Facebook owning a bit of our digital selves?
(For further reading on the real big issues here, privacy and identity, I find danah boyd to be an excellent and thought provoking thinker.)
What do you think?
Will McInnes wrote this on 16.02.09 – 7 comments
It's filed in the Social networks box
Last week I was lucky enough to get involved in ittriga09 – a conference that was part of a larger project that started last year run by Transitions Online in Prague. The project, Interactive Tools for Better Transparency, had this aim: (taken from the Transitions Online project spec as seen here on Dan Mcquillans blog post about it last year)
“This year-long initiative seeks to provide NGOs in the new member states of the EU (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria) with web tools and strategies that will better enable them to promote transparency and good governance norms in their respective countries. The Internet is a powerful tool for the dissemination of information to the public and policymakers; however, NGOs in this region have been slow to adopt Internet-based approaches and, as a result, a great deal of their socially-useful research remains unavailable or poorly organized, having limited influence on public policy.”
The project kicked off with a training seminar in Prague, which the excellent Dan Mcquillan from Make Your Mark (an NM client) spoke at, which kicked off some excellent pilot projects over the last year. This conference was about reviewing those projects and looking to the ‘what next’ for them all.
I volunteered to get involved to give the group some practical tips and techniques in testing their sites and getting them ready for users, and to also talk about how they can start reaching out to their audiences online now they have started building platforms, using buzz monitoring and network mapping.
It was fantastic and very inspiring, on so many levels:
Meeting some of the people working at the NGO’s and hearing about their missions, challenges and great work they do in their countries.
These NGO’s only starting to look at these new online technologies last year and how much learning they’ve done in the last year and the excellent pilot projects they’ve put together so quickly.
Seeing some of the other examples of online activism, campaigning and freedom of information sharing from some of the excellent speakers.
A couple that were particularly interesting and I’d recommend having a look at:
Tony Bowden from mySociety showed us some of this organisations fantastic UK-based campaigning sites, do check out mySociety and in particular FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow.
And Sami Ben Garbia from Global Voices talking about digital activism in highly internet censored Tunisia – one really interesting campaign was the practice of Geobombing – with this example of it being used by Tunisian activists from the collective blog Nawaat.org to link tens of video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners and human rights defenders to the Tunisian presidential palace’s location on Google Earth, because YouTube is banned in Tunisia. Absolutely fascinating.
Following this conference a lot of the delegates went straight onto Barcamp Baltics that weekend (some of the techies involved but also the non-techies from the NGO’s who are finding themselves slipping into geekdom!) which sounded excellent and extremely international with 23 countries represented.
And the exciting thing for me now is to see the conversations following on from this event; that this is not the end of a project, but the start in a lot of ways; the news of more funding secured for another pilot project to get off the ground; and the ideas floating around of these NGO’s from different countries working collaboratively on projects to get ideas off the ground more quickly, cheaply and without being lost in the sea of the individual organisations work.
All in all, I am so glad to have been involved, if only to see the amazing work that is going on in organisations I didn’t know existed and how quickly and in a nimble way they are starting to adapt to the new online world and do their good work within spaces that their audiences are now residing. I look forward to seeing the projects progress and staying involved to help out where I can and keep learning & being inspired from these excellent digital projects happening in organisations all over Europe.
(image credit – Yaroslav Azhnyuk)
Anna wrote this on 14.02.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Democracy, Development, Ethics, Events & conferences, Interesting box
Here in the heart of the NM engine room, or the dev-den as we like to call it, we love to celebrate the most pointless of events, and this week sees the Unix timestamp (the number of seconds elapsed since midnight January 1st 1970) reach 1234567890!
This fantastic event will occur on Friday 13th 2009 at 23:31:30 UTC, it’s not a particularly significant time or date but it’s interesting and fun nonetheless. As we love to celebrate things like this we have knocked up a Ruby script that will update a Twitter account, letting you know exactly how far off this historic milestone we are, so you can celebrate with us!
Follow @utcwatch to get in on the action (or visit www.coolepochcountdown.com to watch the event unravel in real-time). Also check out Wikipedia if you’d like to know more about the Unix timestamp.
Thanks to Flickr user totalAldo for the image.
Edward wrote this on 12.02.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Development, Funny, Interesting, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Off topic, Strategy box
Jenni recently spoke at an event held by Fresh Business Thinking on the subject of internet marketing and more specifically how small businesses can start to engage with social media and some practical tips of how to get going with your digital strategy.
See the video and view the accompanying slides for a breakdown of:
- five easy tips to get you started with social media
- some examples of how we have been using these approaches with our own clients
- a list of must reads for those bookworms who want to know more
Like what you see? Sign up to receive more of Jenni’s and our collective wisdom from our range of free, no nonsense ebooks for marketers.
Would you like to book Jenni to speak at your event? Please get in touch with me, Ruth Baker, Marketing Co-ordinator to discuss the possibilities.
Ruth wrote this on 10.02.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Business, Buzz monitoring, Events & conferences, Marketing, Social media, Strategy, Web technology, ebooks box
TwitterSheep is a simple service that takes a Twitter username and generates a tag cloud based on the biographies of that user’s followers. This is quite superficial, since a Twitter bio is limited to 140 characters. It would be more comprehensive if it generated the tag cloud based on your follower’s actual Tweets (similar to the way that TweetCloud works for single users) but I expect the limiting factor here is bandwidth and processing time on their server. However, I thought it might be able to give you a useful insight or two so I had a little play with it…
Here’s the tag cloud for the NixonMcInnes Twitter feed. Social media, web, digital, PR and marketing are all big tags which seems about right.
But what about the uses for this for brands on Twitter? I can see this being useful to brands who want to know more about their customer’s interests (surely all of them?) I had a quick look at the Twitter accounts used by a couple of NixonMcInnes clients to see what their tag clouds looked like. First up, JP from O2 – a Twitter account to help customers.
It actually looks very similar to NixonMcInnes’ followers. Perhaps this shows that the account is of more interest to the social media and PR industry folks than it is to O2 customers. Or it could be that in spite of Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry, Twitter is still quite a niche, early adopter crowd. Or perhaps O2 customers don’t follow the account back, even if it has helped them.
Next I looked at the tag cloud for followers of WWF’s Earth Hour Twitter feed:
Again, we see some familiar big tags, but also some other prominent keywords like ‘world’ and ‘green.’ Not surprising given the nature of Earth Hour, but perhaps this shows that many Earth Hour followers aren’t just casual supporters of the cause if they mention these words in their biography.
I’m curious about other uses of these kinds of tools for brands. Fire away in the comments if you have ideas.
Tom wrote this on 09.02.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes, Social media box
