How I Use Twitter
June 29, 2007 at 10:59 am
This past week I’ve been twittering a lot more than before! Thanks to Olivier who switched me on to Twitterific, an extremely cool little app that sits in the bottom of my screen and updates whenever one of my Twitter friends makes a comment. I also like Twitterific because it only works on macs; in a world of ’sorry that’s pc only’ it makes a pleasant change. 
I’ve noticed that there are two approaches to Twittering:
- The Literal - ie. answering the call “What are you doing now?” I’m in this camp and enjoy posting about the fact that I’m singing along to Damien Dempsey on Wednesday, or sharing a website that made me laugh. Stewart Curry is at this too - and God, I thought I had cheesy taste in music!
- The Microblogger - people who post in an abbreviated way to how they’d post their blog. In fact, Niall Larkin has just announced that he’s taking a blog holiday to concentrate on microblogging. These tend to be links to sites/articles/news and are informative/educational in nature.
Neither is right nor wrong. Because it’s how you make it. But I have enjoyed an extra layer of communication this week. It hasn’t affected my productivity. And it’s helped me get answers to some things when I needed them. So go Twitter!
“Getting to know” RSS
June 27, 2007 at 5:25 pm
So what is RSS anyway?
Picture this: it’s 4.30pm on a sunny Thursday…you’re having a bit of a strowl around the web and you come across a blog you like. The content is funny, it’s about a subject that interests you, so what do you do?
Web 1.0 - you add the site to your favourites, never to be seen again.
Web 2.0 – you add the RSS feed to your reader and can see at a glance whenever there’s new content published.
Just like with a website, you don’t need to understand how it works in order to enjoy it. So it is with RSS, you don’t need to understand xml to enjoy it! Like all good things on the web, Google offers a wonderful free tool that you can use to keep on top of your feeds. It’s called iGoogle (or Google home page) and all you need is a gmail account in order to get started.
How to set up your RSS feeds:
1. Go to http://www.google.com/ig. Click sign in, then either enter your gmail details or create a gmail account. Sign in.
2. Go off and find a blog you like. Look for the orange RSS symbol and click it.
3. On the next page, click ‘subscribe with Google’, tell it you’re using Google home page, then marvel when you go back to your Google home page – as the latest entries from that blog will appear on your home page!
Once you get started, you will get seriously addicted to RSS. Anytime you come across a site that’s half way decent, you’ll want to RSS it. Then if they don’t deliver, you can delete them from your home page in the click of a button.
5 Things to Know about the Audience of the Future
June 27, 2007 at 9:47 am
One of the most popular talks at Reboot and a blogger I’ve been directing all my parent friends to is Ewan McIntosh. A teacher from Scotland who has definitely earned himself the best job in education, he’s part of a 3 person team charged with bringing technology into the classrooms of Scotland. Irish education officials take note. Time to shake up our antiquated education system (chuaigh me, teann me, rachaidh me, rachadh me. . .aris!).
Firstly Ewan made the point that the citizens of the future are now. 2007 is a significant year in that it is the first year that kids who’ve only known a world with the internet may enter the workforce. As employers, as parents, as citizens, this is what we need to know in order to not get left behind:
1. Huge Audiences
These kids are used to huge audiences, but for them it’s still local - they really care about what their family and their classmates think. The fact that they’ve got 200,000 blog readers a month is just the norm for them. Check out this animation by 6 year olds in East Lothian, it’s had 1,886 views so far.
2. Creativity
Is allowed and is good! Did you know that 98% of kids starting school are deemed to be at genius level, but by the time they leave school this number has dropped to 2%? School as a genius suppressor.
Ewan gave so many brilliant examples of kids’ creativity - some of my favourites were:
- Using Flickr groups to tell a story in 5 frames - this can be done for kids learning languages or indeed expanding their use of English.
- Art teachers teaching art appreciation through Flickr. Hover over the image for info and check the comments below. This is engaged learning.
- Kids learning French and enjoying it through animation. Lots more examples from the Pie Movie Theatre here.
My absolute favourite is this one:
Flight or Fantasy is a virtual reality game and Ewan showed us how teachers such as Tim Rylands are using this to teach English language skills. The whole class gets involved, kids get to rap about what they see, how they’re feeling, they all go on a journey together in this virtual world and make decisions about what to do next. Check this out for amazing vocab.
[God I wish I was back in 2nd class!]
3. Genuine
Kids who were brought up on the internet can smell bull a mile off. They don’t go for it, so don’t do it. Lower production values but genuine win hands down every day over shmalzy talking down stuff.
4. Authentic
Addressing the ‘but why do we have to do this?’. When the learning experience is authentic, you’ve captured their minds. An example of this is a teenage girl who was so inspired by a school trip to France that it brought the whole first world war history lesson to life. She wrote her history essay, with lots of added input about how she personally felt and put it up on her Bebo page. Networking your homework - she got her friends to critique her essay before handing it in. Imagine how awesome it must be for teacher and student alike to have that level of attention!
5. Tools
They all have mobiles in their pockets, many with built-in cameras and videos. As a school don’t suppress it! Embrace it by using social networking sites like Flickr and Youtube and others. Think of those mobiles as creative aids waiting to happen.
Blogs as Websites
June 27, 2007 at 9:46 am
When is a blog just a blog? And when does it become a fully content managed website?
When you’re looking at creating a 10 pager website, the smart solution is to create the site as a blog. The standard pages of your site, About Us, Services, etc. become simply pages on your blog. It looks identical to a ‘normal’ website. It costs slightly less to produce - always a good thing! And you get the added benefit of a blog of course!
Top 5 Reasons to Blog
- Open communication channel between you and your audience. Replace ‘press section’ of old with a blog and allow your audience to communicate with you through comments.
- Opportunity to display your knowledge and demonstrate your passion. Whatever it is you’re blogging about, when you get into the habit of blogging it will become second nature, and you will look forward to sharing the snippets of information that you come across over the course of your week. This, in turn, gives your audience a flavour of what you’re about and helps them to form an opinion as to whether they wish to do business with you.
- Helps your search engine ranking. Because search engines value sites that have frequently changing content, your blog site will score more highly on the search engines than a competitor site that doesn’t change from one end of the year to the next. In addition, when people link to you it accelerates your ranking because one way inbound links are the gold of search engine optimisation.
- Free content management system. Why create a website and invest in WYSIWYG software such as Dreamweaver or Contribute to manage content when you can do it for free with blog software such as Wordpress? Why learn how to use those packages when Wordpress is as easy as sending an email?
- Easy way of adding rich media to your site. If you want to add video or image, it’s as easy as cut and paste. You simply find something on Youtube or Google Video that you want to add, you copy the embedded code that appears beside the clip, paste into your blog and bang - move over BBC, you’ve got video content happening! When you get into this, you can create your own video - particularly good when you create things that look good - upload to video, download and paste it into your blog. Easy!
When you choose to go for a blog as your site, the only difference in the development process is when the design is complete. At that stage, normally we go off and construct html/css templates and build your site page by page. When you go for a blog site, we still construct the templates but instead integrate it with Wordpress. It takes a little less time, so it costs a little less.
We’ve got a couple of blog sites off the blocks already including one for my brother’s restaurant, Kin Khao Thai. It’s not 100% finished yet because we have images of the smiling Thai staff to go in. Plus a few other bits such as the glowing reviews from Tom Dooley and Paulo Tulio, but my brother has been busy opening his new restaurant in Gorey, so the website has been cast aside a bit. But check it out and you’ll see what a blog-site looks like.
We’re also working on two very different blog sites at the moment: one is for a fashion designer who is excited about being able to add video and images of her work to the blog. Another is for a cleaning company that is really passionate about the results they achieve. They’re excited about blogging about new innovations in cleaning as well as uploading pics of recently completed sites.
So you see, whatever your business, there’s a strong case for moving over to Wordpress. And not just a financial one!
E-Business Forum Moderator Woe
June 26, 2007 at 4:55 pm
The Enterprise Ireland e-business list moderator is a bit too opinionated for my liking. He (and I’m making an assumption here - all we really know is that it’s called PA) regularly ignores valid posts from the community about things he doesn’t agree with. Most recent case was when someone posed the question about what kind of laptop they should buy. I posted about macs and how great I find them. One of my comments wasn’t posted.
But the latest thing where I feel that PA has overstepped the mark is in relation to a post last week by someone from a Government department looking to source a Web 2.0 consultant. The usual nay-sayers came on strong such as this:
I fear by using all the buzz words (web 2.0) that you actually bring someone
who will lose you in jargon as opposed to someone who actually understand
business. Ajax can cause real accessibility issues. Bring business
requirements first and technology second.
Then there’s an 8 paragraph piece by the moderator (is that allowed?) that is patronising to the original poster and includes such annoyances as:
There’s this thing that happens where organisations feel they must jump on
the bandwagon and Web 2.0 is a classic.
We do tend to forget many of the fundamentals when we get blinded by
buzzwords like Web 2.0.
And followed up by the ultimate paragraph in which PA shares his remarkable insight about blogs:
And blogs — well a corporate blog is essentially an extension of the PR
function. But it risks backfiring on the business if you allow subscribers
to the blog to freely comment.
I jumped in with a rather fantastic comment that also demonstrated extreme strength at containing my frustration - hey I’m the moderator of this blog, so I can be as gushy as I like. . . PA responded by taking my message to bits. That’s OK, I can handle it! But whatever strength his arguments had were lost by his reminder to all of us to think of Boo.com - that over-worked case study that has nothing to do with Web 2.0 and social networking and blogs and flickr feeds and all those good things.
More debate followed with the usual suspects being touted as experts in the field, until an anonymous poster asked are there any good examples of Web 2.0 sites? I glanced at this, but didn’t respond because like most people I had a lot of work to do. In fact, that’s why we never send corporate emails on a Monday because everyone is so consumed with being a good employee and wants to simply work! Then today, PA came back with this snide remark:
I just laughed… I thought there are lots of dynamic and interactive sites in Ireland. Then I realised that all the services that came to mind were by global players like eBay, Yahoo, Google, Flickr. They’re all doing interesting and really dynamic stuff with Ajax/Web applications and customer contributed content.
Thanks Enterprise Ireland Moderator for the vote of confidence in the industry you moderate a forum for.
There is one that looks like it could be interesting though - LouderVoice.com who are somewhere in county Cork.
Thanks PA, you’re obviously very well up with what’s happening. I promptly jumped back in with some sites: www.touristr.com,
www.spanglish.ie, www.loudervoice.com, www.roam4free.ie.
Why have someone so negative and with such a low regard for the Irish web industry have so much control over the conversation? In my opinion, the Moderator’s job is to check for spam and rude language and nothing else. Anyone share that feeling?
Escape this Bad Weather
June 24, 2007 at 8:26 pm
At least for a moment. Lovely ad that delivers 30 seconds of escapism.
Design Killers
June 21, 2007 at 5:22 pm
I just told a client that I’m going to cease working on their project because they are killing the design. We put forward 2 particularly beautiful designs - and for the last few months they (a committee of non-design oriented people ) have changed every element. Today when they were saying they wanted a white panel on a white background. . . and a blue background against a page of blue links, I just had to take a stance.
I have never done this before.
Normally at this stage, I just take the view that the client gets what the client wants and I give up the fight. In this case however we are only at the home page; it’s already dismally dreary - I don’t relish spending the next 6-8 weeks on content and build for something that I won’t put my name on.
Sky Handling Partners : Know Your Enemy
June 21, 2007 at 8:55 am
On the way back from Reboot, Sky Handling Partners misplaced blogger and technology journalist, Damien Mulley’s bags. Their customer service was appalling so Mulley’s reaction was to set up a site called I Will Not Hold as a way of documenting poor service by airlines, telecom companies, rail companies and any others.
Today I read a post from Damien about how he’s been receiving email confirmations about signups for gay dating sites.A bit of easy investigation on his part revealed the IP address of the person doing the signing and it turns out to be none other than City Jet Handling - which is the former name of Sky Handling Partners!!
Can you believe it? Someone at Sky Handling is being this vindictive, unprofessional and this stupid? Apart from being illegal, unethical, unprofessional, you surely wouldn’t want to take on Angry Man Mulley - customer who sets up a complaints website because his bag has gone missing!!
I pity the poor F****er in Sky Handling because I think he’s about to lose his job. PR agency for Sky Handling - get on to it and get on to it quick. Maybe they could do a nice video to put up on the new Irish version of You Tube? They could film it in a sauna or something to show that they are not homophobic along with everything else?
Shift in Time
June 20, 2007 at 9:22 am
One of the talks at Reboot that most stayed in my head was by Stowe Boyd about time as a flow. Read more about it. I was interested to see the work of one of the final year photography students at DIT. Sean Sullivan examines the idea that there has been a shift in the way contemporary Irish urban dwellers experience time. The images he presents for his final year show were exposed for one hour at selected points around Dublin city - with each hour corresponding to the 24 hours in a day. It’s interesting.
And this is beautiful.
And there’s a bit of an online squabble going on between Stowe Boyd and David Rogers here.
Ubiquity is the New Exclusivity
June 19, 2007 at 8:33 am
According to Carla Hendra of Ogilvy in the US. Carla gave a great presentation that has really stayed in my mind. Her main points on the day are summarised below:
Video is the new tv
Text is the new print
Mobile is the new outdoor
We don’t know where the consumer is anymore, but we want to meet them on their turf and terms.
Ubiquity is the new exclusivity. But we can’t afford to be ubiquitous.
Is Google the new agency?
Is it a distribution platform or an agency?
There’s certainly a lot of activity in that space. Google acquired Doubleclick $3.1 bn. Microsoft buys aQuantive for $6 bn. Yahoo purchases the 80% of Right Media it dioesn’t already own for $680 million. WPP gets 24.7% of Real Media for $649 million. [A lot of scrambling says to me it's the early days of a new paradigm.]
When clients want their marketing to be more accountable they ask us to optimise. Being able to make the right decisions but coming from an analysis of the huge amount of data that is available, that’s what clients mean by more accountable.
Most Effective Online Ads
4 key elements – art, science, innovation, experience
- Art = creative ideas. It can’t be commoditised.
- Science = growing in importance. Can be used to achieve healthier ROI’s.
- Innovation = re-inventing the agency around brands. Once it starts, it spreads like wildfire.
- Experience = contact. What allows the consumer to think, feel, touch, evaluate, maybe purchase. Content creation and distribution are having profound implications for the online business.
What works for online direct:
[It seems a lot of the old tried and tested print DM rules rule!]
- Size matters. Bigger performs better in DM metrics.
- Put a face on it. People sell better, get higher metrics.
- Place logos on the right and ‘above the fold’ (horizontal).
- Get to the point, simple direct messages work better.
- Offer and main point in the initial frame.
- Grabbing attention with rich media – they get more clicks but less conversion rates. Works better at beginning and end.
- GIF based and Flash based ads work similarly in terms of response, but Flash costs more and allows you to do more.
What works for online branding:
- Size matters.
- Put a face on it.
- Frequency adds up.
- Find some private space – a little bit more white space improves brand awareness and noticeability of the ad. Just a couple more pixels.
- Get a halo effect with rich media – raises other response rates for non rich media around it.
- Content is king.
What else works?
- Video/advanced tv (eg. visible world) – very effective at creating response click through.
- User generated content
- Mobile
- Search
- Gaming
- Branded content and entertainment
- Community
Then she presented a whole series of interesting case studies to correspond to each of her point above, but all really interesting - and relevant too. She said that at Ogilvy, they don’t go out to clients anymore without a fully expressed digital pitch. Whether the client asks for it or not, they get digital. I think that’s where many in the Irish market would like it to go too, but they just don’t have the capability - yet.
She mentioned branded video content as being ‘explosive’ amongst the VC community right now. Irish readers - we can expect this in another 2, 3 years? ! In general though, it’s the wild west right now. [And that's even in Amercia.] We’re going to focus on building a knowledge base with continued testing. We’re not always going to be right, but must take the risk. Carve out 15% and demand something new. Don’t be afraid of it. Embrace digital.
Carla was one of three women who presented at the FOOA in New York the other week. She rocks!
