I really enjoyed speaking at the National Housing Federation #fedcomms event yesterday, in our session there were two 15 min talks, one from me and then Jamie & Michelle from Freebridge community housing followed by a panel discussion.

Here are my slides from the event, the rest are on housing.org.uk

The discussion was especially interesting, some good questions and I carried on some of the conversations through lunch.

I feel we covered the brief well, with only 15 mins the goal was to encourage people to start thinking about some of the issues and not to try and comprehensively cover all legislation etc

+ sorry to those that had to stand at the back!

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Working with the team at Liz Lean PR we conducted a snapshot survey of 100 people (around Bournemouth, in February) to see what the general population were saying about their employers online and if they’d received any guidance from their employer on what they should say.

This was partly inspired by the upcoming (now live) changes to the ASA Cap Code:

“From 1 March, marketing communications on companies’ own websites and in other third party space under their control, such as Facebook and Twitter, will have to adhere to the non-broadcast advertising rules as set out in the CAP Code.” (Source: ASA)

A (massively) simplified version of the code would be: ensure that all your communications are legal, decent, honest and true.

We asked 4 questions:

1. Do you use Facebook or twitter? (yes/no)
2. Have you ever written about the company you work for on Facebook or Twitter? (yes/no)
3. Has your company given you any guidance on what you can/can’t write on Facebook or Twitter? (yes/no/don’t know)
4. Have you ever heard of the new ASA standards / CAP code? (yes/no)

Full details and responses to the survey in our press release on Pressitt.

The two key findings that stood out for me were:

1. Half of all employees have admitted to writing about the company they work for on a social media website, such as Facebook and Twitter (49%)
2. A staggering three quarters of those who have written about their company online either did not know of, or had no guidance from their employers regarding what they could or couldn’t write (75%)

Think about that for a minute, the implications that 1/2 of your staff are writing about your business online on social networks… and it’s not just the expanded ASA remit that needs to be considered, regulation such as the FSA could also apply to your business.

Liz Willingham, from Liz Lean PR summarises it better than me:

“The results of our survey highlight the importance of good communication from the top down. As ambassadors of your brand, employees need to be made aware and given comprehensive guidance on how to conduct themselves in all situations to protect the overall reputation of the company.”

We’re looking to put on an event for our clients after Easter, in the mean time if you’d like any guidance please do drop either of us a line.

If you want some interesting views from leading experts on the new ASA Cap code changes I strongly recommend this eConsultancy post.

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I ran two sessions at #bcbomo3, one on ableton live and the other… The Failure Swapshop

My aim for the session was to encourage people to celebrate their failures and share with the group the lessons they learned.

It went a bit like this:

“Hi, my name’s Luke, and I failed” (cue cheers + applause from the crowd)

“I did ___, it failed because of ___ and the lesson I learned was ___”

I kicked off the celebration of failure by talking about a start-up I worked on many years ago that lost its way and failed.

After a slow start, where people needed encouragement at first, the session really got going and more and more people opened up and shared business, personal and technical failures. Some were valuable life lessons, some… well… simply hilarious!

I wrote any lessons learned onto the white board (both sensible + silly):

• Stay on target (Stay focussed)
• Don’t lie about your abilities (but if you already have, learn the thing you said you could do asap!)
• Don’t trust:
  • Grown ups
  • Other people’s code
  • Your own code
  • Lotus Notes
  • Consultants
  • Programmers
  • Acronyms
• Back ups = Good
• Don’t get distracted by shiny things
• Don’t think you know it all
• Check for typos
• Always check the box contents
• Try a restart
• Don’t try to be funny (the story behind this one was BRILLIANT, I won’t recount it here)
• Don’t expose your dev server to the world
• Ask for help
• Failure can become a win

If you’d like to share your failure, please do add a comment below and tell us what happened and most importantly what you learned from your glorious failure.

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Bar Camp Bournemouth is done and dusted for another year, big thanks to all our attendees who made the event so good and our kind sponsors:
Proactive, Nokia OVI, Bournemouth Uni, the BCS (Dorset + YPG) and G3 Radio

A great variety of talks, from the technical to the… less serious:

Day 1 grid:

(Day 1 photo from Tom Morris)

Day 2 grid:

If you missed it this year, go forth and follow @bcbournemouth for details of next years event… or look out for a Bar Camp near you!

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We’re less than 2 weeks away (Feb 26+267h) from Bar Camp Bournemouth 3, last years event saw over 100 tech/web folk converge on Bournemouth uni for 2 days of talks, discussion and stuff.

See the site above for more info (few tickets available at time of publication) or search for #bcbomo3 on twitter for the dicussion around the event.

Also coming up for all creative / web / techy folks is the fabulous Meetdraw (Mar 24th) – more social than bar camp but still very much worth attending for those around Bournemouth who are creative / web based businesses.

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