Social by Social – “A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact”. Buy the book for a tenner and/or download the PDF for free
BBC – The Knowledge Exchange Blog: ugc@thebbc – “a year-long project which produced a huge amount of data, and proved to be the first significant study of UGC at a broadcast organisation”
2009 MTV VMA Tweet Tracker | MTV.com – VMA Tweet Tracker [mtv.com] is a real-time graph of Twitter activity that highlights the social news surrounding the Video Music awards by aggregating the most popular terms being tweeted around this event. Developed by Stamen Design and social media monitoring company Radian6,
I like Delicious a lot. It’s like the Internet’s version of a gated community, but one that’s open to any content as long as it meets some fairly simple criteria – it must be good enough for someone to want to bother bookmarking it with Delicious.
It’s nicely flexible too, with many uses. I ‘follow’ a bunch of interesting people to see what they reckon is worth bookmarking. The only problem is, for one reason or another, I don’t tend to visit the site very much.
Twitter’s nicely flexible too, and also has many uses. Unlike Delicious I follow Twitter a lot (usually via Tweetie). So, what I’ve done, is plug an RSS feed from my Delicious network into a new Twitter account (using Hootsuite to do that). That way new links will plonk into the stream of updates I follow, or I can check the profile if I feel the need.
This isn’t yet another post banging on about how great socia media is, ok? It’s a glorified links round-up. Sure, I might want to prove a point, but it’s mainly a round-up of useful scraps of info.
Just wanted to make that clear.
For a bit of background, the Birmingham Post printed a piece by John Lamb, Birmingham Chamber of Commerce’s Press & PR Manager, today in which he castigated social media – seemingly Facebook updates in particular (although Twitter and MySpace got a mention too). Dave Harte and Jason Hall have pretty much covered my thoughts on the matter.
Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with giving social media a kicking if it’s done right, but John Lamb’s attempt was so clumsy and unbalanced that I’ve been moved to provide some redress.
So, as John cherry-picked the most banal things he heard via social networks (mainly Facebook, I think) over the past week, so I’ve picked out the most useful things I’ve discovered via Twitter in the past 24 hours.
Fusions is a space for organisations or individuals to explore new, potential projects, forge partnerships and share funding opportunities (via @wesharestuff)
The Birmingham Bead Shop is setting up at the Custard Factory (just down the road from my office) and blogging about it (via @getgood)
In other Custard Factory news, Rooty’s is being refitted and there’s been mention of ‘fine dining’ (via @stevegerrard)
I could, if I wanted, watch a live stream of today’s AmbITion event in Bristol (via @hadleypaul)
Karl Binder is developing a website for enabling collaborative writing projects. The working title is Screenbound (via @karlbinder)
The RSC have a photography-related event with Ellie Kurttz at their open day on Sunday 19 July (via @amyclarke_uk)
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s press officer now has a Twitter profile (via @tmstvns)
I saw a frankly hilarious video of Sepp Blatter falling over (via @lovelychaos)
There’s a bloggers/tweeters/whateverers meet-up in Birmingham on Monday. Birmingam Chamber folk welcome, I’m sure (via @peteashton)
Following a visit to Birmingham the other week, Citilab Barcelona are arranging their first social media clinic for Sept/Oct (via @cataspanglish)
The Art of With asks and answers the question – “what do the advent of the web, collaborative practice and open source ways of working mean for the arts and art organisations?” (via @clarered)
I got some nice responses to my message that I’m off teaching in Guyana this summer
Tonight’s episode of The Home Show features a guy who looks a bit like me. Only chunkier (via @editorialgirl)
Actually, I’ve only gone back five hours but I reckon that’s plenty.
Of course, I’m not saying everything in that list would be of interest to everyone, just me – but then I follow people who interest me. Seeing as how all social media does is help people to communicate, perhaps John Lamb’s real problem is his network.
Of all the Twitter visualisations I think this is my favourite so far.
It’s a Yahoo! Pipes/Google Charts mashup made by Xefer which plots the frequency of tweets and replies by day and hour. More importantly it looks kinda cool.
As you may have heard the blog I run, Created in Birmingham, won the award of Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards.
As well as being pretty pleased with the outcome I also found the whole thing fascinating. I’ve got a list of blog posts I’d like to spin off but I thought I’d start with something that only ocurred to me because of this tweet from @anne_brand:
Anne (who I’ve never met) is linking to this thank you post on Created in Birmingham in which I thanked the usual people, mentioned one of the other blogs that I thought was particularly worthy of attention and listed everyone who had given their support online.
I’m guessing her tweet referred to the list of supporters, which ended up being rather long. Over 200 individual Twitter users mentioned CiB, as did 80-ish blogs/forum posts/organisations/etc. Keeping track of them all and compiling a post with links cost me a few hours sleep and a little piece of my sanity. It was important to do it though.
Why do it?
Here’s the thing – it didn’t occur to me to not do it. CiB won the award thanks to the efforts of the community around the site. It’s only right to thank everyone and the way to do that in internet-land is to link to them. So that’s what I did. It took ages keeping track of everything and writing it up but it’s such a small price to pay really.
I have previous in this regard though – I did a similar job after the 2008 Supersonic Festival and Birmingham Opera Company’s ‘King Idomeo’. These ‘collective memories’ end up being an interesting document of who said what and I’ve always meant to write up how I go about collecting all the links.
How to do it
Twitter
I discovered the tweets using Twitter searches of the following keywords – ‘Created in Birmingham’ CiB’ ‘#votecib’ and ‘http://tinyurl.com/9m6mwl’. By way of explanation:
#votecib is a ‘hashtag’ – a unique identifier to attach to a message on Twitter. Messages on a similar subject can then be more easily found with a search (as long as people use the tag).
http://tinyurl.com/9m6mwl is a shortened URL which stands in place of a longer one – when you’ve only got 140 characters to use in a message, characters are at a premium
To track these in real time, and respond with a thanks if/when necessary, I used Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a desktop-based Twitter client (that is to say it’s a little programme that you can use for reading your Tweets) which has a large panel display and allows separate panes for searches. It’s a bit industrial-strength as Twitter clients go but it doesn’t half get the job done. Heres what it looks like (click to enlarge):
It’s not quite as scary as it looks but it was a bit of a distraction. Whenever someone tweeted using one of those search terms I recorded their name in a text document I kept handy. That’s all there was to it.
The other links
I did a Google blog search and sorted results by date to see if anything relevant had been posted. I did that fairly regularly to keep up with any ongoing conversations and to see who was talking about us. I bolstered this with the odd search on Twingly and Icerocket too.
It can be quite hard to search for a post or comment left in a forum but I tried Boardreader, Boardtracker, and Omgili. The results were better than nothing, but only just.
At the end of the voting process I did a couple of regular Google searches (mainly combinations of the keywords ‘CiB’, ‘Created in Birmingham’, ‘ Best UK Blog’, ‘Weblog Awards’ and ‘vote’). Working up to page 20 of the results I came across a few new items.
Again, I recorded the URLs of any blogs I found in a text doc to be written up later.
Simplifying the process
A couple of things I could’ve (should’ve) used to lighten the load:
Google Alerts (searches of blogs, news, the web, video and groups) delivered by email or RSS – there was really no need to keep searching when I could’ve just taken a sec to set this up and waited for the updates to roll in
Social Media Firehose – a Yahoo Pipe that searches a swathe of sites and presents the results saving you the legwork
If I was monitoring these terms for longer than a week I’d have set these up straight away.
Any help?
This sort of thing can be applied to whatever you’re interested in. It would make sense (and is not at all egotistic) to have some sort of automated search set up for your name, although bad luck if your name is John Smith. Ditto for your company name and any topics of particular interest.
However, I’m sure there are easier and more comprehensive tools/techniques that I’m not yet aware of. Any suggestions would be welcome.
As previously advertised, on Friday I made my way down to The O2 to have a nose about. I was there to check out the filming of a new advert highlighting all the goodly things available at the venue (priority ticket booking, access to private areas, etc) if you’re on the O2 network.
I gather that my involvement was part of a proof of concept – seeing what it was like to have bloggers involved in documenting what goes on behind the scenes. Essentially I’d been brought along to blog, tweet, photo and video lots and was given pretty much unfettered access to do so. There are worse ways to spend a Friday.
Anyway, I met up with @benrmatthews (who was doing remarkably well considering he’d been hosting 200 or so Twitterers at the inaugral Twestival the night before) and @drewb and we were ushered into a strange world of horses, wrestlers, bands, dancers and all sorts of other weird and wonderful things.
There’s no point me describing what went on because I was documenting things as I went along. So, for a flavour of the day here are my tweets (to be read from the bottom up):
Here are my photos (there are more from Ben and Drew – we tagged everything o2bloggers):
And here are a couple of videos I streamed (and recorded) live using Bambuser, a nice little service that I’d all but forgotten about. Please bear in mind that these couldn’t have been any more spur of the moment so there’s no incisive questioning or anything. The first is with Ed from O2 who explained what the ad is for:
The second is with JP, O2’s Digital Communications Manager – the guy who monitors the internet and responds to O2-related problems, queries, etc that people might have:
Some other stuff from the day, bulletpoint-style:
We got a tour of the building from the events manager which was pretty sweet – they don’t usually do tours.
Drew, Ben and I were initially the subject of 5 mins of curiosity. Sample question – “Blogging… why?” Actually that was as deep as the conversation went.
Actually, saying that, one of the stylists was talking about getting some sort of website together so I spent a couple of minutes setting up a blog here – Lucy Harvey. I showed her what some companies around Birmingham are using blogs for which impressed her so I’m hoping she makes some use of it.
The editor was Joe Guest. I wish I’d chatted with him more because he worked on the Cadbury’s Gorilla ad as well as music videos for U2, The Streets, Kasabian and Dirty Vegas. He looked kinda busy though.
I got the distinct impression that if this wrestler didn’t want me to exist it wouldn’t take him much to snuff me out. Dude was huge.
The O2’s (v swish) VIP bar is going to be the venue for a hack day sometime in October. More info on that to come.
Anyway, it was a good day. I got to poke around the venue and saw some things you certainly don’t see every day. It was fun to really put Bambuser, Flickr and Twitter to work for a few solid hours, even if the best lesson I learnt was about how quickly an iPhone’s battery can be used up.
I also enjoyed meeting the guys from Hotwire and am hoping to keep in touch, especially as some of Ben’s side-projects (the Twestival meet-up and Bright One, a PR company for charities and such) might maybe have some overlap with some of my own.
