Digital Consultant links for June 18th through June 23rd

These are my links for June 18th through June 23rd:

  • Social Media Playbook – A little 101, but some useful up-to-date stats on the latest hip and happening social media networks, and some tips as to how to use them well for business in this E-Book. I disagree with some of their frequency guidelines: this should depend on the quality of content you have and the level of engagement of your audience.
  • New training courses I’m delivering: Creating Online Video for Web and Personal Branding – I've recently started to develop and deliver e-marketing training courses for Derby's Creative Exchange, a professional media training centre at University of Derby. I'm really excited about these new courses which are really expanding the reach of e-marketing to new practical and strategy elements. The first two courses are on Creating Online Video for the Web (29 June) and Personal Branding (30 June). Both are free to Derby city residents, and cost £25 if you're not.
  • The future of social/E-Mail Integration – E-Marketer research on businesses linking their social media to email campaigns, and vice versa. Seems very few are doing it (which seems like a no brainer to me) but more are going to step up their integration. I always say to clients: don't throw baby out with the bathwater: email marketing is still the highest conversion, highest sharing of 'social' media and best way to build in a long term opt-in customer base.
  • Margaret Gould Stewart: How YouTube thinks about copyright – Video from the Iconic TED conference series on how YouTube's technology allow rights holders to register tracks and when matches in the system are detected (including music in the background and mashups) the rights holder can decide if they wish to allow their film & music work to be used in its new context, presenting a new twist on copyright in the digital age.
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June 23rd, 2010 | | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Digital Consultant links for May 31st through June 6th

These are my links for May 31st through June 6th:

  • Well, what is a good digital music strategy ? Part 2 – Social Networks – Virginie Berger with some useful advice and stats on the potential for promoting music on social networks, and some tips to be more successful (like apparently adding 'video' to your video title is a winning tactic).
  • Public Enemy’s New Sellaband Target – Fan funding – getting your 'fans' to pre-pay for your material to fund its production costs – is a great new innovation in the music industry (I recently fan-funded the new Thomas Truax album and received my pre-release download of it today), but this reflection on the difficulties established group Public Enemy have had meeting their targets suggests fan funding may not yet be a mature enough funding mechanism to replace the role (particularly in sales and marketing) of the music industry.
  • The State of Online Video – A new report from the Pew survey of American life showing 7/10 adults are watching video online, with a large rise in humourous, eduactional, TV and film and political videos, with an increase in user-created content.
  • Experiments in delinkification – Nicholas Carr, academic and author of 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?', on why hyperlinking in text may be a distraction from the idea you are conveying, and an experiment with putting links after the text like footnotes in a book. I agree partly with this idea, but actually there's another issue (that newspapers and even some credible online publications like Mashable) that hyperlinking encourages users to leave your site rather than 'stickiness' of moving to elsewhere on your site. It's an interesting balance that needs to be struck between providing context and value to what you write, and making sure the hyperlink doesn't detract from either the flow of your idea or the user journey on your website.
  • Content is everything, so just do it – This is something that has bothered me for a while: the 'signal vs noise' ratio that we all have to be producing LOTS of content (status updates, links on Twitter, blog articles) in the drive for attention and search engine indexes. Of course this is a nonsense, you should write what is good, when you can (I ususally recommend to clients some sort of minimum commitment per month of types of content e.g. status updates, video, news article depending on the needs they identify). Ideas are good, volume is bad.
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June 6th, 2010 | | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Digital Consultant links for April 19th through April 20th

These are my links for April 19th through April 20th:

  • The iPad isn’t a computer, it’s a distribution channel – Interesting take on the phenomena of the iPad and iPhone representing a shift to a closed network for laptop usage, where users engage in tasks within constraints, putting the power into the hands off producers and software/content distributors, rather than the free network of the web. This is an interesting space in monetizing content (the iPad is essentially web content without a URL, that people are forced/willing to pay for) but one which seeks to constrain the open possibilities of the interest, trading this off against the convenience and reliability of a closed network.
  • Michael Porter : What is Strategy? – This is great – Michael Porter, one of the top 20th Century business strategists, in a one page nutshell including a summary of the 'five forces' theory affecting a business in the market. I like his take on the internet:<br />
    `In our quest to see how the Internet is different, we have failed to see how the Internet is the same'
  • Ning Exodus | This group is set up to make your transition as smooth as possible – Got an existing Ning website but don't want to pay when the paywall comes up? Grou.ps have set up a transition service that is suppose to let you port a lot of your data and community from Ning directly into Grou.ps
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April 20th, 2010 | | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Digital Consultant links for April 15th through April 16th

These are my links for April 15th through April 16th:

  • Election 2010: what the manifestos promise for media and creatives – Here's one to interrogate your election door-steppers with: what the three main parties will do for the UK's creative industries. There's some reasonable differentiators, particularly in Lib Dem/ Conservative pledge to (perhaps) diminish or cut the Regional Development Agencies. Some hopes still on the horizon for a (too little too late) games industry tax break.
  • Is ‘free’ finally falling out of favor? – Sad news today that Ning, the social network tool that lets anyone set up a niche social network in a few minutes, is adopting a pay or leave model. It's sad: I'm sure a lot of the networks I'm in will go (even a small cost is not always easy to achieve) and the critical mass Ning had with setting up one account to access multiple online communities, particularly in the non-profit space, will whither away. But it's also more symptomatic that this 'poster child' for web 2.0 free communities cannot survive endless free lunches: with Meetup.com steeling a march on real world communities by charging annual fees, we may now start to see the gradual 'pay or die' monetisation of many online services.
  • 5 Ways to Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive – Some help we all need right now! Productivity tools to avoid getting carried away with 'real time' data (from bank accounts to social networks) just because it's there.
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April 16th, 2010 | | Tags: , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Digital Consultant links for April 8th through April 11th

These are my links for April 8th through April 11th:

  • The Collapse of Complex Business Models – Author and academic, and writer of "Here Comes Everybody" Clay Shirky write a good piece on simplifying bureaucracies and business models, using the example of user generated video and 'In The Motherhood', a small hit online drama that failed as a conventional TV series.
  • Forecast: TV, Internet Will Lead Advertising Back Up As Print Wanes – Predicted stats for advertising from 2008-2012 globally, showing that TV (after a fall) is set for growth to return to 2008 levels this year, and internet advertising will continue strong growth, whilst print, cinema and advertising are set for a slight decline in spend. Of digital, the strongest growth will be in paid search followed by display advertising.
  • Digital Economy Bill: Quick Guide To All 45 Measures – Great summary of the Digital Economy Bill, due to be passed as law this Monday, showing all 45 measures, and which have been withdrawn. Interesting to see that Channel 4 now have a remit of distributing film and supporting 'innovative content' and children's programmes as part of their public service remit.
  • What Social Media Will Look Like in 2012 – Insightful article by Freddie Laker on how social media will grow to become an intrinsic part of the digital experience by 2012, as the semantic web and user recommendation seemlessly interweaves with search, ecommerce and other web experiences. I like the idea of seeing aggregated realtime updates of users before you put in a phone call, and ratings as a core part of the e-commerce experience.
  • Bebo’s friends desert it – Business Analysis & Features, Business – Yet another social networking giant looks set to bite the dust.. as MySpace hangs in there, Bebo looks set to have its doors shut by owners AOL. Failure to invest and understand the needs of its youth demographic, particularly in failing to support social gaming, have led to the downfall of the fun site. Big shame as Bebo were once investors of online TV programming such as Kate Modern, and this gap, coupled with Endemol's recent annoucement of scaling down their digital team due to limited online tv investment, heralds the death-too-soon of pureplay web television.
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April 11th, 2010 | | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »
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