I was honoured to be asked by the wonderful Tiffany St James and Dan Bowyer to speak at the LiveTech event as part of LondonLaunch:LIVE this week.

Here are my slides:

[slideshare id=9809857&doc=livetech-law-111021062053-phpapp01]

I spoke about Brand and Reputation Management, Social Media Amplification and adding the magic to your event.

And, as a good summary here is an interview I did afterwards to WinkBall.

Read More

What is Diaspora?

Diaspora is a “privacy-centric distributed social network”, anyone can download the source code and set up a pod on their server meaning they have control of the information and user data on that site.

Every pod can talk to each other seamlessly, thereby creating a distributed social network.

What if I don’t want to set up my own social network server?

You don’t have too, there are publicly available ones, including joindiaspora.com and diasp.org.

Think of the pods/network as a bit like the way email is distributed, in that anyone could have an email server of their own or use a public one (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo…) and you can seamlessly email other people.

What does it look like?

It’s minimal in feel, uncluttered and most things are obvious after a short look around.

Once I had an invite, it didn’t take long to set-up the account and connect it to my other sites (Facebook, twitter).

Read More

…no really they can!*

Find a Facebook page with location information (ie one you can “check in” to) for which you are not an admin, click on the info tab on the left hand side and you should now see “edit” appear in the top right – OMG OMG!! etc etc…

*ok so actually they can’t, but be prepared for customers to THINK that’s what is now possible…

During one of the recent changes to Facebook places, they felt it would be handy if anyone could “suggest” updates to the location information only.

From the Facebook pages FAQ: “On Pages that list an address and choose to display a map in the Info section, anyone viewing the Page sees an “Edit” link. This link allows people to notify Facebook of any location information that may be missing. Note that people aside from Page admins can’t edit the information that displays on your Page even though the link is labelled “Edit.””

And breath… Facebook love making these changes, they certainly keep me… “entertained”.

If you want to switch off this “editable” (note, it’s not actually editable) information, as an admin, select: Edit Page / Basic Information / untick the box labelled: Show this map.

Read More

This week has been a busy one for Bournemouth, hitting the headlines for a couple of the wrong reasons:

1. The flash flooding
2. The tragic loss of a red arrow at the airshow

We’ve also seen what has been dubbed as the “Schrodinger’s dictator” (conflicting reports of Gadaffi being alive and dead), which in a similar way closer to home also occurred with the red arrows pilot: some saying he was rescued alive by dog walkers, whilst others that he died on scene.

Add to this the false reports of riots doing the rounds on social networks and I felt a blog post was in order.

My thoughts in no particular order on when to RT / FWD or re-post:

1. Please THINK before you post – it’s to easy to get caught up in the “first, first, first!” online culture.
2. Forwarding unconfirmed rumors can become self-fulfilling (as I’m sure was partly the case with some riots around the UK). I saw (and due to past involvement in radio, started receiving phone calls!) a growth in rumors that the McDonalds in Bournemouth was on fire… having walked past it only 5 minutes earlier, I was quick to point out it most definitely was not to those asking me and subsequently onto twitter & Facebook.
   In the case of the pilot, whilst mainstream media was careful to state the situation of the pilot was unclear, many were saying he was alive – while I’m generally an optimist, imagine what his wife would of been going through if she’d been anxiously scouring the web for news…
3. Consider the reliability of your sources – having a large number of followers does not necessarily make you either a reliable, or authoritative source – exhibit A: @queen_uk – a lot of people were RT’ing a post from a twitter account with a following in the ten of thousands, a quick look at it’s history made it clear it was a barely reliable (or literate!) source.
4. Rule 32 of the internet: “Pics? or it didn’t happen” – if someone states something as fact, challenge them to provide proof, if in doubt don’t re-post or clearly label it as unconfirmed/unreliable.
5. Use NSFW if the item you are forwarding is Not Safe For Work! (As a rule of thumb, if I wouldn’t share it with my mother, it’s NSFW).
6. Remember not everyone loves: LOLcats / motivational saying / Jokes…

What would you add to the list?

Read More

The short answer: we’re in business to make money.

I had a discussion on twitter yesterday, prompted by a question someone asked me last week: what would I learn/master if I was a student or job seeker today?

I’d focus on mastering html5 and building for mobile first then web.

Personally, I think we will soon be at a place where we develop for mobile first (tablet or phone) and web browser second, I agree with @iangeek when he says that’s not as true for b2b though.

A couple of folks said they’d focus on gis (ie location based), which is a good call also.

I think, as an industry, we’ve been guilty at times of mis-selling apps when a good mobile web site would do the job.

Lets be honest, if a client says ‘I want an app’ we see dollar signs, it costs money to build an app properly… And that’s the problem, in most cases a well built mobile web site would be cheaper to develop and platform independent (great you have an iphone app, what about the larger user base of android? Or blackberry business users? Let alone new platforms like windows phone 7 or the new one from alibaba)… but that is worth less and not what the client asked for is it?

This is the crux of the issue, we should be doing more to sell people the right solution, the one that gets the best ROI and the widest coverage… Not just the one that makes us the most money.

Read More