2010 May

Today’s Digital Consultant Links for May 29th

These are my links for May 29th from 18:05 to 21:31:

iPlayer Makes TV More Social, Without Re-Inventing The Social Network Wheel – Two articles this week show the close entwining of TV and web as two supporting media: BBC's iPlayer is becoming more social, allowing viewers to connect with friends and live chat. Meanwhile, ITV are signalling the arrival of the world cup with more focus on 'two screen' TV (web supporting TV) experiences: http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-itv-formalising-twin-screen-strategy-first-stop-world-cup/
Stop The Presses: ‘Sunset’ For Print In Five Years, FT Sees – In the week the iPad hits the UK shops, forecasters are nodding to the end of the print press and distribution chain, as readers and mobile devices signal the end of tree-based media. Business-to-business publications (like the Financial Times) are likely to be the first to fall, with the timescale estimates ranging from 5-30 years. If you're working in B2B markets – are you ready for an online only content and marketing landscape?
Reputation Management and Social Media: How people monitor their identity and search for others online – According to new Pew Internet research, more young adults in USA are concerned with their online reputation, behaviours include increase searching of their own and their friends names online, and removing tags of themselves from online content.
Six Spaces of social media – An old (2007) but interesting means of categorising social spaces rather than by type or platform but purpose, like 'secret spaces' and 'publishing spaces'. A good way of thinking about user behaviours within the social platform you are working in.
Cloud computing is the new way to do business – A good 101 intro to cloud computing with this short video news features from the BBC.

Digital Consultant links for May 22nd through May 26th

These are my links for May 22nd through May 26th:

Digital strategy is tool every business can use to maximise endeavour – Here's a little interview with me from this week's Evening Post, Nottingham, business section, talking about my work in digital strategy and also a bit about my work with the CreativeNottingham.com project.
Q&A: Gerd Leonhard on why social media beats search – Gerd Leonhard, a very smart chap and the author of 'Future of Music Manifesto' (a big source for my recent study of independent music) on why social media will eventually overtake search, and engagement other reputation management, and why paywalls don't work.
Guest comment: When TV met the internet – the perfect love-child – Tom Laidlaw from Videojug on the impact of online video, which has 10x the response rate of other online media.
Augmented reality: 10 real world examples from the superbrands – Augmented reality is not just science fiction: both iconic and inventive global brands are starting to experiment in ways real products can interact with computers and screens to engage with their product. In most cases it involves connect a printed icon with your webcam (and additional software) so this is a long way from being a mainstream game changer, but a trend savvy marketers will want to investigate. I particularly like the beer that tells you if it's at the right temperature to drink.

Digital Consultant links for May 18th through May 21st

These are my links for May 18th through May 21st:

How Starbucks Engages Millions of Facebook Fans – A massive high street international brand, Starbucks have also been extremely successful at adopting the social media space. In this video interview, their head of Digital Strategy talks about how they have a 'listen first' tactic, and make use of video and special offers to bring people into stores.
Nestle learns its social media lesson the hard way – More examples of how social media is shortening the gap of opportunity, particularly for campaigners, to speed up direct action, in this case against environment-destroying suppliers. As one person notes in the comments, Nestle are lucky this didn't happen in the 80s during the powdered milk for Africa scandal. Another example of how individuals can use social media for collective action. The real lesson here for brands: get smarter, quicker. The campaigners (in this case Greenpeace) are many steps ahead of you.
The top seven Facebook tools for publishers – A neat little summary of the main tools in your arsenal as a publisher/business website to connect your content and audiences with Facebook.
Why I Steal Movies… Even Ones I’m In – Peter Serafinowicz – British comic Peter Serfaniowicz, one of the top Brits on Twitter, writes a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on Gizmodo about why, as a professional writer, actor and content producer, he still on occassion chooses to file-share. And it all comes back down to that old chestnut: convenience. Until the UK market place can accommodate for those with far-ranging tastes (he cites the bizarre example of how Jungle Book is unavailable on iTunes, and pop music promos have been locked down from embedding (i.e. sharing amongst fan sites). It's a brave post, and certainly reflect my own usage of legal and illegal sources of accessing content (in my case the vast amount of what I seek is unavailable commercially, because it doesn't make commercial sense to release obscure, historic film and music content). Until the legal market can provide 'better than free' access and service (without complex territorial restrictions) P2P remains the marketplace of choice for many media consumers.

Digital Consultant links for May 9th through May 16th

These are my links for May 9th through May 16th:

How to create compelling content that ranks well in search engines – A great 29 page e-book by Copyblogger author Brian Clark on how to make great web writing copy that also pushes all the SEO buttons. Some very useful tips, as a long pre-amble to promote his Scribe software which I admit has my interest: you enter your copy and the software gives you tips on how to improve it better for your chosen keywords.
The Internet Conference: Powerpoint Presentations – Susan Hallam organised the Internet Conference last week in Nottingham, an impressive collection of speakers and presentations from major e-marketing, e-commerce and SEO experts. Here's are some presentations from the day.
Matrix: How Facebook’s ‘Community Pages’ and Privacy Changes Impact Brands – Jeremiah Owyang's review of how Facebook's latest raft of changes are affecting brands: mostly as a negative effect. Facebook strategy is to aggregate the web, including wikipedia style aggregation, which negatively affects brands as well as personal privacy. In other news, web people vote overwhelmingly to say they prefer Facebook's 'fan' to 'like' status – which seems to have had the affect already of diluting loyalty to a Facebook Page. http://polldaddy.com/poll/3183296/ Overall, Facebook's endless tweaking and twisting seems to be having a negative affect on it's community. It's international gathering of staff to discuss privacy issues this week may signal a sea-change in their steam-roller approach to aggregating and connect all user data.
Is Your Social Media Strategy Just Digital Flyering? – Good article by Andrew Girvan on lessons from theatre producers on the digital equivalent of flyering – Twitter broadcasting. Some good tips on doing it better: running special promotions, targetting groups of interest, and of course making your Twitter presence be conversational.
From Realities to Values: A Strategy Framework for Digital Natives – No great answers here but a useful framework for understanding how to define and consider the needs of 'digital natives' (or the under 28s as this article defines them) when planning a digital strategy including content creation, engagement and advocacy.

Digital Consultant links for May 4th through May 9th

These are my links for May 4th through May 9th:

Interview With Will Page, Music Industry Economist – Great in-depth interview with a very clever man, Mr Wil Page, the Economist of the UK's Peforming Rights Society (music collection agency) on the importance of UK's successful digital sales industry, the weakness of the 'Long Tail Model' and why Spotify and Trent Reznor are worth investigating.
Digital Strategy: How To Develop a Digital Strategy: Part 1 – Great article by Rich Nadworny on the processes (methodologies and thought processes) he uses as a digital strategist. These basically form into two phases: research and intelligence gathering, followed by setting goals and objectives. For my own work I use a variation of these tools – essentially focusing on people and the organisation, followed by intelligence gathering then goal setting/measuring. I'll be blogging more on my own methodologies soon, in meantime sign up to Rich's blog for Part 2.
7 things people get wrong about the Internet and TV – An interesting take on why the internet is not killing TV: far from it, video/web TV needs the maturity of the TV model to succeed. I also read a report this week that suggest that when people are surveyed about their media viewing habits they usually underestimate TV hours viewed, and over-estimate web video. All in all, David Lynch was wrong – TV isn't dead (yet).
Digital Strategy: How To Develop a Digital Strategy: Part 1 – "Digital strategy, simply put, is a plan to use digital, two-way media to communicate with other people. The keys in that sentence are: plan, digital, two-way." Great article by Rich Nadworthy neatly summarising exactly what digital strategy is about: different areas of detailed research followed by setting goals and objectives.
Strategy’s Golden Rule – The one golden rule of strategy: don't try and beat the competition incrementally, but find out what they do badly, then aim to be great at that. Using the example of Apple's bad customer service and others, this is a strong lessons in reinventing the rules of disruptive innovation.

Digital Consultant links for May 4th through May 9th

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