Monday, November 17th, 2008
A weekend of travel means less blogging this week, but definitely not less reading!
Blogging
You want to show you know what you’re doing, even if the company you’re in follows prehistoric methods, so that the next person who hires you has a reference point. Joseph Jaffe tells you how in AdWeek - Save Your Career, Start A Blog
RSS
Daily Blog Tips has 50 Simple Ways To Gain RSS Subscribers - some might just come in useful!
Word Of Mouth
Andy Sernovitz gets another link this week for telling us why Your Word Of Mouth Markting Doesn’t Have To Be About Your Product. I’ll admit I liked this post partially because Molson Canadian is my new favourite beer while I’m here in Canada. (Oh and they have a blog, and recently an event right here at Queen’s!)
John Johansen had a great experience at Best Buy, which is the polar opposite of what some companies are doing in this recessionary period. (Examples to be posted, soon). He also mentions that because it was a special event there was extra help, free drinks etc, but many people also bought something. Do you think they included his blog post (or any other positive ones) while measuring the ROI of that event?
Social Media ROI
While we’re on that topic, David Meerman Scott tells us how to Answer The Ultimate Question: “How do I convince my boss of the ROI of new marketing?” - It’s not a long video, definitely worth a look.
Gen Y, Millennials and Digital Natives
Quickly becoming an interest point for me these days. Prof Netzley has a deck on Educating Gen Y and how collaborative technologies foster participant-centered learning. . I’d say it’s definitely worth flipping through, especially if you’re trying to figure out what the heck Gen Y is about and how we learn.
Tags: adweek, andy sernovitz, best buy, blogging, collaboration, collaborative technologies, communicate asia, daily blog tips, david meerman scott, digital natives, educating gen y, Gen Y, generation y, john johansen, joseph jaffe, michael netzley, millennials, molson canadian, new marketing, participant centered learning, queen's university, recessionary times, ROI, rss, save your career, social media roi, start a blog, ways to gain rss subscribers, word of mouth marketing
Posted in Links | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Lots of awesome stuff this week, let’s get into it:
Social Media For Beginners
I’m always conscious that everyone’s visit to my site could be a first visit. If you’re looking for a great resource for how to dip your toes into social media’s waters, how about 35 tips for getting started with social media? Very beginner friendly.
Online Influencers
No secret, this is a pet topic of mine. Read Write Web says research suggests influencers are alive and well on social media sites. John Bell of Ogilvy also talks about working with word of mouth influencers and the ethics involved.
RSS
RSS adoption at 11%? I wonder if the numbers are accurate. It would seem lower than that, just from my personal friends.
Research
Two interesting articles on the usage patterns of Africans, particularly with respect to mobile. Might be of interest to the Comm215 Wiki at some point in the future, I suspect.
Community Management
Everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and hire a community manager. Consider the job hazards of the community manager as told by Jeremiah Owyang before diving head in.
Finally, for education, The Edublogger asks if you’re making your life easier with Google Calendar. Vastly underutilised tool in classrooms and project groups for collaboration and it’s time you get started! Although my online tools have expanded to include reQall and Remember The Milk, I started with Google Calendar (or GooCal, as I affectionately call it), and it’s a great starting point.
As always, do share interesting links you read about this week with me, you can find me on delicious.com/uniquefrequency or simply leave the link in the comments!
Tags: african mobile usage, blogger outreach, community management, community manager, edublogger, google calendar, jeremiah owyang, job hazards of community manager, john bell, online influencers, read write web, rss, rss adoption, social media for beginners, tips for getting started with social media, wom, word of mouth influencers
Posted in Icio | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Just got back from the IDC Web2.0 Conference today (thanks to Debbie and Joyes for granting me access!) and have some immediate thoughts before I go into detail about the various topics discussed.
Main thought: People need to do more research before coming for these conferences.
I estimate about 200 people in the room, and when the room was asked who used feeds (RSS), less than 30 people raised their hand.
Now I’m not judging, but I think if companies are going to spend $240 to send people for a three hour conference, they need to be able to absorb what is going on and follow the discussions. If only 30 people understand feeds, how many would understand the rest of the topics today? Wikis? Co-creation of content? Social networking? User-generated content? I have my doubts. I think companies owe it to themselves to do a little bit of research before going, so that they can truly engage in the discussion.
The thing is there was some good content at the conference. One speaker mentioned it’s not necessary to be front and centre of the content-creation, just a curator. And I wonder how many people got the reference.
Edit: Maybe next time after a conference I should walk up to people randomly and ask “So what do you think the takeaways are for your business?” and see what answers I get.
Finally, a question was asked towards the end of the day: “Is there research to show that using IM and Facebook increases productivity? And are some professions more suited than others to using social media in education. For example, would it be applicable to medicine?”. A muted groan rippled through the room.
Firstly, obviously there is no research to show that. The people who question the benefits of IM, Twitter and Facebook are those who are not on it or don’t understand it or are suspicious and un-trusting of their employees to be on these applications. Do you think people aren’t using the office phone for non-productive uses? Or the office email? Or the office printer?
The reason why this question comes up, to me, is because companies want to see this instant gratification. Are you using Facebook to generate a sales lead or close a sale? No? Waste of time. But it doesn’t work that way. Facebook, Twitter and IM take time to produce results. I spend a lot of time in the office on Facebook. I joke that it’s “research”, but finding out how people use Facebook and interact is very important. If you don’t know how your consumer is using their tools, how can you ever hope to be relevant?
Will there be employees who abuse this trust and throw sheep or superpoke friends at work? Sure. But I don’t feel that’s a reason to shut down access, because to me, the benefits outweigh the cons. Let’s keep this all in perspective. It’s the people that abuse the tool. Not that there’s anything inherently “wrong” about the tool.
Secondly, what a crazy question! Can the medical profession use social media? Of course! I honestly and truly question why this person was at this conference at all. The whole morning people were talking about interaction and content sharing and co-creation and wikis and transferring ideas and collaboration via Google Docs.
You mean you don’t see how medical knowledge can be pooled together, developed and refined via these tools? Or did you seriously mean doing away with practical surgery sessions and teach it via social media? Which is absolutely ridiculous too.
It is people like that, that are holding social media (and your company) back from advancing. The new consumers are not going to be convinced by an advertisement in the newspaper. If it’s not timely and relevant, forget it. If your business is not showing and interest in discovering how the new consumers think and behave, you might not be around in 10 years when they graduate and choose to spend their disposable income with a company who does.
Tags: close sales, co-creation of content, curator of content, facebook, facebook and productivity, facebook at work, feedburner, feeds, generate sales lead, generation y, google reader, grand copthorne waterfront, IDC web2.0 conference, new consumer, rss, Singapore, social media conference, social media singapore, social networking, twitter, user generated content, wikis
Posted in Singapore, Wikipedia, social media | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
I used to read no less than 100+ feeds coming into Google Reader a day. My current reading pattern looks something like this:
As you can see, most days I read less than 60, some days even less than 30. The difference? I’ve been using Twitter a lot more and clicking on links that people are sharing via Twitter. I’m assuming I only have so much attention for information online, and this is a natural selection process. (Let’s not even get to my close to non-existent FriendFeed usage).
Has anyone else noticed this trend? I know @stripedshirt and @MikeReynolds posted tweets saying they identify with the trend, while Louis has a great blog post on why he has no issues with information overload. Anyone else?
Tags: @MikeReynolds, google reader trends, rss, rss tradeoff, stripedshirt, twitter, twitter tradeoff
Posted in twitter | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
A regular feature on this blog, here are the other blogs I subscribed to in March which I feel should be shared with the community:
A VC - I have no interest in VC, but every now and then there’s interesting stuff on social media that I read and enjoy.
Socialmedia.biz is a great site keeping up with social media in the business setting.
I like Student Blog Project because the notion of using web2.0 in education is a curiosity of mine and I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon it on ping.sg early in the month.
Inside PR is one of the many podcasts that I’ve added to my Ipod (soon to be Ipod touch) this month. I think it’s a great listen to keep up with what’s happening in the PR scene in Canada. Their recent episode talks about interns not wanting to do admin work (?!). Dave & Terry: I will be in Canada later in the year and will be happy to do admin work on top of whatever else you require.
Pamela, who I also follow on Twitter has a great blog, and us PR/social media students have to stick together!
I also added:
bub.blicio.us and PR 2.0 by Brian Solis
Digital Influence Mapping Project by John Bell
Andy Wibbels
Influential Marketing Blog by Rohit Bhargava
Ubernoggin by Intellagirl aka Sarah Robbins.
Winextra by Steven Hodson
PR and Comms Network
As always, if you have a blog you think I should be subscribing to, please feel free to leave it in the comments section. I’m currently a little overwhelmed by my feeds, but anything that adds value will still be greatly welcome.
Tomorrow: Blogs I’m Subscribed To: Singaporean edition. Lots of good stuff, I promise.
Tags: andy wibbels, blog subscriptions, brian solis, bubblicious, canada, david jones, digital influence mapping project, influential marketing blog, inside pr, intellagirl, john bell, pr 2.0, pr and comms network, pr2.0, rohit bhargava, rss, sarah robbins, social media, steven hodson, student blog project, terry fallis, ubernoggin, vc, web2.0 in education, winextra
Posted in Blogs | 6 Comments »
Sunday, March 9th, 2008
- Want more subscriptions? Do what Chris Brogan does: Ask!
- Chris Clarke tells you why you should be an expert in some field to bring something special to the table. (Told you this guy only writes good stuff)
- Maybe we’re not facing Facebook fatigue? Statistics suggest there are still plenty of unique visitors on Facebook. Maybe it’s the early and/or late majority catching up?
Tags: all quirk no play, chris brogan, chris clarke, comments vs discussions, early majority, expert field, facebook, facebook fatigue, faux facebook fatigue, fugitive hunt, job hunting, late majority, mas selamat, nabilah, rss, subscribe, terrorist singapore
Posted in Icio, Singapore, social media | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
For all you early adopters, the AssetBar invites have been re-opened over at Louisgray, don’t miss it this time!
There’s a little technical requirements with OPML, but just click at the buttom of the page for a simple guide on YouTube.
I’ve already signed up and am very, very excited to explore the social features of sharing what essentially is your RSS feeds.
If you do sign up, do add me as a friend as well, my user name is uniquefrequency (surprise!)
Tags: asset bar, assetbar, rss, rss feeds
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
Louisgray is very quickly becoming one of my top “must reads” whenever something comes from his RSS feed. Late January he alerted the blogosphere about AssetBar, and now he has the latest on LinkRiver.
So we already use Google Reader or some other RSS reader, why LinkRiver? Without trying it out yet, the biggest draw for me is that is aggregates everything from your RSS feeds to Twitter to Del.icio.us bookmarks into one central location. As Louis says:
harnesses your RSS streams from multiple services, including Google Reader shared items, Twitter, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Bookmarks and others, and posts them to a single “Stream”. As your friends join the service, or you choose to subscribed to other LinkRiver users, these small streams become a “River” of shared links, hence the name.
To get a real good idea, check out Louis’s stream right here. I for one am already sold and have sent in my beta application.
The one negative that I can see coming out of it is if someone is pushing similar feeds on social bookmarks, Google Reader and Twitter, and then it could get very tiresome to deal with. I suppose we’ll find out soon won’t we?
Do you keep your feeds/updates central? Or is there some other way you keep on top of everything? Let me know.
Tags: aggregator, assetbar, blogosphere, centraliser, delivious, google reader, link river, linkriver, louis gray, louisgray, must read, must reads, rss, rss feeds, twitter
Posted in social media | 3 Comments »
