These are my links for July 12th through July 14th:
- What makes the perfect Transmedia Producer? – In-depth discussion on the types of skills and approaches which are working in transmedia. It's heavily led to the Alternative Reality Game (ARG) producers rather than wider producer of entertainment media for new platforms.
- Social media monitoring: time to say ’sod it’? – Thought piece on why moderating – and interrupting – Joe Public's conversations in social media may not be a great idea. I think it depends on what you do – people often Tweet about brands because they want help/ response, and certainly being responsive on your own profiles is critical. Joining in wider conversations (e.g. forums or general discussion) will depend on how useful a contribution you can make to the discussion. This may favour technology/product suppliers more than consumer goods and services.
- UK online video stats: Youngsters favour C4 and ITV over BBC – Blimey: how online video has grown. 2010 sees 5.5 Billion online vdieo viewed each month in the UK, with BBC, ITV and BlinkX as fastest growing properties. Interestingly, the desirable youn 'uns (16-24 year olds) are preferring ITV and Channel to BBC properities.
- Concept Feedback | Free Concept Reviews for Marketers, Designers and Developers – Here's an interesting 'concept' – this website is a community of designers which lets you upload your concepts for design, websites and print and get feedback from other community members. Offer enough feedback and it's free, or pay a small fee. A great way to get feedback within a community wider than your own organisation, but in a closed setting.
- Cultivated Play: Farmville – Intelligent article by A. J Patrick Liszkiewicz on why Farmville defines many of the rules of being a good game, but creates social capital through effectively a peer pressure to be kind to your friends (& Farmville neighbours). I'm wondering in anyone in the gaming/digital industry actually like Farmville – no evidence yet, but no denying simple, formulaic social gaming is a major global phenomena. (hat tip: Pete Ashton).
These are my links for March 31st through April 6th:
- The Collective Intelligence Genome – Fascinating findings from research from MIT's Centre for Collective Intelligence showing ways you can use open source development or 'crowd sourcing' as part of a production or decision making process.
- One-third of users willing to pay for apps – Interesting mobile stats: just 35% of mobile users willing to pay for apps, highest in iPhone users, lowest in Android, although Blackberry users pay far more than iPhone users on average per app. This is definitely the growth area for digital content and services development, showing users will pay up for mobile content. But it shows that the serious money isn't in iPhone and producers should look at spreading their production and distribution across multiple mobile platforms.
- SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask) – Regular readers of this blog will know I'm no big fan of SEO (or 'snake something oil' as one social media guy I know described it) but in recent months I've mellowed on the subject – when using good navigation, good content and good structures supports people to find and discover good content I'm all for it and there's no doubt it's the affordable way for a small business to draw traffic to their e-commerce site. This is a brilliant guide – one of those that you can read and learn about 80% of what you need to know about SEO in one quick hit. Which is good because it means less time spent reading about SEO…
These are my links for February 19th through February 22nd:
- What women want… from online games – Summary of research into habits of women who play social games. In short: they like to play for a short amount each week, they don't want to pay, they still feel stimatised as 'coming out' as a gamer.
- Blogging Innovation: Four Models for Competitive Crowdsourcing – An explanation of how different forms of crowd engagement can work, by filtering through experts or directly to an audience, and the relative merits of both.
- HOW TO: Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Ready – Mashable article great for retail and 'real world' businesses on places to get listed and take advantage of the new phenomena of connecting real world places with mobile digital interaction, e.g. virtual loyalty cards.
- There’s No Future in Digital Strategy… – Well I may as well pack up and go home then.
Ah…
…But there will always be a future for strategy in a world going digital.
It's subtle, I think I agree. It's a business strategy for a 'going digital world' not just limited to the strategy for what we do using digital. And this fits perfectly with the ethos of what Digital Consultant do: helping you to succeed by building strategies for the digital economy. Voila.
These are my links for February 7th from 14:01 to 15:59:
- Six Pixels of Separation: Stop lurking and step it up on social networks – There aren't a lot of great videos about digital strategy (hmm that gives me an idea…) but this one by Mitch Joel to promote his book Six Pixels of Seperation is really great and focus on the 'why' of digital strategy, rather than asking about the 'what' (the tools and technology). Spot on the money, and I'll be developing some further thinking on developing the 'how' through my clients and on this blog during the year.
- Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization – I loathe the 'science' of search engine optimisation (or 'snake something oil' as a social media person I knew called it), but I'm realising in work I'm doing currently that it's actually still quite critical as a low-cost way to get the traffic to your site that you deserve. I'm recognising a growing gap between the 'being good' (aka 'built it and they will come') social media 'evangelists' and the web science as commerce SEO people (whilst I think both approaches alone are flawed, it seems hard to get these two groups to work together). This Aug 2009 is priceless, and could probably be described as 'the only SEO article you need to read ever'. It explains what the most crucial on page elements are and how you can optimise copy for them, but intriguingly contains a chart that reveal that on-page copy only accounts for a horrifying 15% of a web page's success. It's all about reputation, time in market, and link juice – thus showing that we need social marketing to make sites work.
- Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 1: transparency and the trouble with top tens – Travel writer Fiona Cullinan's blog is an experiment in crowd-sourced journalism. This 4 part article on how she used web 2.0 tools to crowd-source a top 10 article on romantic destinations was particularly interesting to me as I spent nearly 5 years editing a travel website (www.pilotguides.com) and wrote quite a few top 10 articles for magaznes too. The process is largely subjective, but Fiona tries to put some scientic approach to opening out access and reviewing the data. The verdict: crowd-sourcing takes nearly twice as long, with larger margin for off-the-mark content, but perhaps makes editorial richer and more diverse.
These are my links for December 11th from 14:03 to 14:07:
- Seth’s Blog: Is it too late to catch up? – A great nugget from the often eloquent Seth Godin on how a company who have done little or nothing in the online space can play catch-up: start with basic stuff: email, e-newsletter, reading and bonuses for online engagement. Do stuff and learn as you do. I disagree though about not having meetings about web strategy: strategy can go alongside (or before or during) the doing to add value.
- Serious games: key trends for the healthcare sector – Another article I wrote for the Engagement Strategy journal for healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing leaders. This is about serious games, an area I've been involved with for many years, giving an overview of serious gaming trends in mainstream health games, and also specialist research and software. Includes interviews with Playgen and Active Ingredient.
- Social media as a healthcare research tool – I forgot to link to this before…my head was full of forthcoming holidays and suntan lotion.
Here is an article I recently wrote for Engagement Strategy, a journal for healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing leaders, which is all about social media and online tools used for research – i.e. the bit before you do the engagement with people. Includes an overview of sentiment analysis, crowd-sourcing and open innovation.
