Archive for the 'Social Media & Technology' Category

These are the slides for my talk at London Metropolitan University, Business School on Thursday evening 15 October:

… together with the full length email interview I conducted with Martin Smit, host of The NBT Podcast:

If you’re doing something remarkable to become a “Social Media Idol”, I’d love to hear about it - I am researching a book by that same title and I’m looking for great case studies. Leave me a comment or email me via the Contact page.

I’d like to thank Milan Todorovic, Senior Lecturer/Course Leader for Music and Media Management at LMU for inviting my co-author Silvia Cambie and me to speak at the University. You can follow us on Twitter.com - Milan = @LondonMetUni), Silvia = @xculture and I am @fusionview .

Online bookseller, Amazon, has got the bibliophiles all a-quiver with excitement with its announcement that the Kindle will be sold internationally from mid-October. For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, the Kindle is a digital book reading device, rather like the clay tablets of ancient times in size and look but electronic and able to store over a thousand books plus mp3s as well as blogs and digital newspapers and magazines. So far, it’s only been available in the US so this next phase is very exciting for book lovers all over the world.

I use the term “book” loosely, of course. Those book lovers who love physical books will not be excited at all by the Kindle on the basis that it lacks all the tactile qualities they love about “real” books - paper, page turning etc. But those who love the content of books and love the idea of being able to carry a thousand books in their pocket, the Kindle is the next big thing.

I fall into the latter group for various reasons:

• I’m lazy and feeble and I like the idea of holding one compact tablet that I can read lying down as well as sitting up.

• I like the idea of being able to carry a range of books around with me but without the weight of the physical books to give me backache and arm ache.

• I like the idea of the text-to-speech facility so that I can load the full text of a book and have it read to me while I sit on the bus. The digital voice might be quite irritating, however - so it will all depend on how life-like it sounds

However, I’m not going to jump in with my credit card immediately as I have some reservations:

• I believe the Kindle ties you to buying all your ebooks from Amazon, in a Kindle-specific format. What happens when my Kindle dies - as inevitably it will, like all electronic devices? I guess I’ll have to shell out for another one - we’ll all start having to think of books like music: but with mp3s or CDS, I can buy my player from any supplier, not just the one company. With the Kindle, am I now stuck forever having to buy it from Amazon?

• I still need to be convinced by the screen quality and how quickly it refreshes when you turn the page - I had a look at the Sony Reader and what put me off is that the screen turns black for a second before it opens onto the next page: ugh.

• It’s a pretty steep price at US$279.

• I remain to be convinced about it’s usefulness outside the US. At the moment, a huge number of e-books from other ebook sites which are available to US buyers are not available to non-US customers due to geographical rights restrictions. Also, if you look at US Audible.com compared to UK Audible.co.uk, the number of audiobooks available in the UK is a lot less than those available in the US - and in particular, major latest releases in the US are glaringly missing from the UK list. I haven’t been able to find anything definitive on the Amazon.com site that gives me any clarity either way about geographical rights restrictions - can anyone help me with this question?

Speaking of geographical rights restrictions, the Kindle will not be available in some countries, including Malaysia - see the list of no-Kindle countries. So my litblogger, book loving friends there are still stuck with the tree-pulp versions of books - although Amazon did reply to blogger Sharon Bakar’s email query to them to say that maybe, perhaps, sometime in the future, the Kindle might become available there…

What about you? Are you going to get a Kindle? Or are you a hard and fast paperbook person?

Photo: thanks to jink (Derek) on Flickr.com (CCL)

Whenever I talk to businesses about blogging, this issue invariably comes up: “We don’t want a blog because, well, what about negative comments?”

The thing is, people are talking and commenting about your business online - as well as off-line, I might add - whether you like it or not and whether you have a blog or not. It’s difficult to track what people are saying offline because speech leaves no vapour trail. But chatter online does. The very least any business needs to do these days is to accept that blogging and social media are here to stay, whether they like the idea of these things or not - and to monitor what people are saying about their business or brand online. They may not be saying it on your business’s blog because you don’t have one - but they may be talking about you on their own blogs, in forums, on Twitter, on Facebook etc.

And now there is a new player in town that could transform the whole web into a social network of chatter and comment - Google’s Sidewiki, launched within the last few weeks. The unnerving thing about it is that it enables people with the Sidewiki app installed in their browser to comment on your website or blog or webpage right there next to it - the comments can be seen by others who also have Sidewiki installed BUT you won’t know about it unless you also have Sidewiki. As the webpage owner, you cannot control those comments in any way - not delete, not hold for moderation, nothing. You could add your own comment within Sidewiki if you install it on your own browser and as the site owner, you have the right to insert a sticky comment that always stays at the top of the comments once you’ve verified with Google that you are the site owner - but that’s about it.

So the old strategies of making your visitors register in order to leave comments or holding comments for moderation are all out the window. Anyone with Sidewiki installed in their Internet Explorer or Firefox browser can comment on your webpage anytime anywhere and those comments will be viewable by anyone else who has Sidewiki.

Here are a couple of comments I found on the Sidewiki alongside The Times Online front page:

• Anthony Anders - 28 Sep 2009
  We can now comment without limitation - Not one comment I have ever entered on any of your articles has been approved by your team of censors. Now, thanks to SideWiki, we can comment on your articles freely. As you gradually see the comments on your website move to Sidewiki rather than appear on the site directly, perhaps you will engage in some deep and thoughtful reflection about why this is happening. Perhaps you will even begin to recognise your own failings.

  Richard Hamerton-Stove - 1 Oct 2009
  Digital Healthcare, PH7
  Indeed - I’ve only been using the sidewiki for a few days and already I find that its pervasive nature suits my browsing habits much more than the somewhat awkward and clunky comment features. The moderation issue is one that we’ll have to watch closely.

Andrew Keen in The Telegraph and Charles Arthur in The Guardian take an “anti” stance and worry about Google dominating the web and collecting the data from Sidewiki to monetize users comments in some way. They predict that take-up will be slow or minimal and that Sidewiki will die its own death.

The level of entry is relatively easy for most people - click to add Sidewiki to your browser, sign up for a free Google account and away you go. So take-up could be huge. But I think that the problem will be spammers, flamers and trolls - if they take over and cannot be controlled in any way, then regular people will desert Sidewiki or not find it worth signing up. Personally, I’m finding the app interesting to play with at the moment - it’s fun checking out the “hidden” comments that only us Sidewikians can see (a little icon of a comment bubble appears on the left side of the screen to indicate that someone has left a comment on the page you’re looking at) and I’m having a go leaving my own side comments. There is integration with Twitter and Facebook, and you can also share your comment by email. My comments are all aggregated on my Google profile.

Web strategist Jeremiah Olwang has a much more interesting anaylsis of Sidewiki and its implications for businesses than the knee-jerk “hate it, hope it goes down in flames” angle of the two broadsheets I mentioned. My own view is that whether Sidewiki in its current form stays or goes, the trend is towards an open-source approach to commenting and discussions and we will be seeing more public, free-for-all (in all sense of that phrase) spaces for everyone and anyone to throw in their tuppence worth.

So, for any business reading this, whether you hope Sidewiki will live or die, you need to add it to your tracking tools for now…

Illustration: screenshot of sidewiki column alongside Guardian page

Today, 23 Sept Sydney woke up to an eerie dust storm - the red dust from the outback has been picked up by strong winds and blown across the country. Experts have attributed this to climate change and the ongoing drought afficting in Australia.

I picked up the above photo from the Guardian Online website, one of a gallery of amazing scenes. (You can check out the gallery by clicking on the pic alongside). Wanting to find out more- and especially how this phenomena is being covered online - I had a meander through the internet to see what else was out there.

There are a lot of home videos on Youtube, uploaded by Ozzies affected by the red storm - mainly shots of their backyard and local area. The most interesting video of the batch is a slideshow compilation of photos sent in to ABC Radio Australia by their listeners:

On Flickr, there’s also a group project on Flickr, “The Red Sydney Project - Dust Storm Days”. One of the group administrators explains on the group page:

“We awoke to an intense glow. We rose from our beds and we started shooting. This group is a collaborative effort to capture a virtual Sydney from Sept 23 - the morning when an eerie duststorm captivated thousands of digitial cameras across the city.We hope you’re enjoying the group photos, so far. The response has been tremendous and the photos are stunning. We welcome shots all shots from the dust storm including NSW, ACT and QLD.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed! 1000+ photos!”

Anyone who has a Flickr account can join the group and at the time of writing, there are 368 group members (up from 367 even as I was viewing the page!). The slideshow below shows the photos submitted by the members to the group pool:

There’s a map, too, showing where the photos were taken as well as a discussion forum.

For background information about the environmental conditions that caused the dust storm, The Sydney Morning Herald has a good slideshow with audio interviews on top explaining the issues. There’s no embed code for me to bring that over here so you’ll have to go over to their page for the meteorological backgruond.

Word based blogs have been secondary in this news event, with many of them posting Flickr items or linking to news reports (rather like me here on the other side of the world!). This is not surprising as the phenomena is obviously best captured visually. I’ve found a few brief blog accounts:

Silvermonk

Travelblog

Wedding Planning Tips

When I posted an link to the Guardian photo on Facebook, an Australian friend based in London added a comment to say that he’d been in touch with a friend in Sydney who reported that everything had cleared by midday and blue skies were back.

Marc Wright, Chief Executive of simply communicate and Chair of the simplygroup, did a video interview with us during our book launch. He has edited the interview down to this great 3 minute video that brings out the key points of the book.

I blogged about Mobile Phone Novels awhile back and got this email recently from a writer who had only just come across the post.

There’s been a resurgence recently in the short story, ever since the success of movie adaptations of them, such as Brokeback Mountain, so this trend towards short literary forms in innovative formats strikes me as part of that move towards bite-sized reads.

Congratulations to TP Keating for his/ her success in this fascinating new genre!

~~~

.

Hi Yang-May,

In answer to the question on your blog, “Do you know of any writers in English who have a written mobile phone novel?”, I am putting my hand up!
As you say, “…one could write it on a PC, blog-style, and then post it to whatever mobile phone novel site there is around.” That’s exactly me.

Textnovel affords readers the opportunity to follow along as I add new chapters to my latest work. Readers can post comments and vote on my stories too, once they have registered (which is free).

US romance publisher Dorchester Publishing, in conjunction with Textnovel, is currently running a contest, where the author with the most votes will
secure a $2,000 advance, along with a publishing contract. My contemporary romance, London by Chance, is in contention for this prize.

My previous stories, Twilight Journey (supernatural) and Robinson “Zombie Killer” Crusoe (horror) have been Editor’s picks, and I am amongst the
top ten most popular authors on Textnovel.

According to feedback I have received from readers, the stories on Textnovel have been successfully accessed on “a native browser on a small-screened LG handset and the browser on the large-screen T-Mobile”, amongst other options.

Thank you for your very enjoyable, informative blog.

Kind regards,
T.P. Keating
London
www.tpkeating.com

Photo: thanks to Ed Yourdon on flickr.com (CCL)

Twitter is THE big thing these days on social media. Barack Obama and other presidential candidates made it hip for politics in the last couple of years. Celebs like Stephen Fry and Oprah have also helped with bringing Twitter to the masses. Royalty have got in on the act - check out Queen Rania of Jordan (thumbs up for a smart and appealing use of the app) and also the British Monarchy (thumbs down for press releases galore).

Now, it’s the turn of the RAF in the UK and NASA in the US to use Twitter to bring what they do to a wider, global audience. The RAF hopes to use Twitter and also Flickr to help with recruitment, according to New Media Age (NMA). Six RAF personnel have been given multimedia phones to upload pictures and commentary on what they are doing. One paragraph at the end of the NMA article made me smile: “The RAF’s latest recruitment project comes as the Central Office of Information revealed its annual report earlier this week. It spent £40m on digital marketing in the 12 months to March 2009, an increase of 84% year on year” - I hope that they didn’t spend £40m just to come up with this Twitter / Flickr campaign!

Over in the USA, space agency NASA has its own Twitter feed as do a number of astronauts such as Mike Massimo and Mark Polansky. There is also a general NASA Astronauts feed. I’m following the two astronauts mentioned and it’s wonderful and surreal to read their updates from space - all about space walks and orbitting earth - while I’m here at my desk going about my daily business. We’ve come a long way from the Apollo missions and the moon landing back in the ’60s when we all crowded round the TV or radio to hear the latest bulletins - now we can get real time updates straight to our PCs or mobile phones directly from space!

Photo: thanks to ImpactLab.com

Back in the old days of Hollywood, legend has it that Lana Turner was “discovered” in Schwab’s drugstore and went on to become a megastar in the movies of the 1940s and ’50s. More recently, South African born Charlize Theron was spotted by a talent scout in a bank queue in Los Angeles and has since been a Hollywood A-list female star. But these days, with online digital media, you don’t even have to leave home to be discovered to become a big star - as Malaysian singer-songwriter Zee Avi found out.

Zee posted videos of herself singing songs that she had written up on YouTube and became an overnight sensation, according to the official YouTube blog. She was then signed by US label Bushfire Records, according to her Wikipedia entry and is currently touring the US!

Her original video of her song No Christmas For Me is below:

Zee’s YouTube channel is at http://www.youtube.com/user/KokoKaina where you can checkout more of her music and videos.

You can also listen to her interview on the US public radio channel NPR.

It’s really exciting to see the power of social media in helping new artists make it into the big time - and especially exciting when this happens to a fellow Malaysian!

One of the early uses of the internet was as a networked space for academics to communicate with each other. In the subsequent rush of businesses online with Web 1.0 websites and now with the rise of social media in the form of Web 2.0, it’s easy to overlook what academics are continuing to do in this virtual space.

Back in 2007, I blogged about the Oxford University project that has put online fascimiles of Wilfred Owen’s poetry via the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.

Now, the University and the Municipal Library of the city of Rouen in France has created an online archive for the original manucript of Gustav Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary, the original desperate housewife.

The site is in French but if you go to the navigation bar on the right and click on “Feuilleter”, you will get a further selection of “Plans et scenarios” and also “Brouillons 1- 6″. Click on any of those subselections and you’ll be given the option to view different parts of the book. Select any of those and a new screen will show you a fascimile of the original handwritten manuscript on the left, with Flaubert’s amendments, and a typesccript version with his strikeout and additional text also shown.

As a literature grad and also a novelist, I find it fascinating to look at writers’ manuscripts - to see their original words and how they may have changed a word or sentence here and there to better convey what they have imagined in their minds. In the British Museum, many years ago, I pored over some pages of the manuscript of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte that were on display in a glass cabinet in the manucript room. It was amazing to see the tiny handwriting and Bronte’s original words as well as the changes she had made. It was frustrating at the same time in that I could view no more than the few pages they had placed on display. The brilliant thing about the online Bovary fascimile is that not only are specialist scholars able to access every page of Flaubert’s manuscript but anyone in the world may do so also - with the assistance of the typescript alongside and without damage to the original.

Often, when I talk with businesses or organisations about blogging and social media, whether in the formal context of a presentation, or informally at a drinks party or over dinner, a common reason why they have not engaged in social media - say they never will - is because it is an open and interactive space and people could leave negative comments about their company/ products/ services on their blog.

In response, I usually explain that the reason that people would usually leave negative feedback publicly is that there is no other recourse easily available to them to express their grievance to the business/ organisation in question. This is usually because access to that organisation’s customer services is non-existent or difficult to find or once it’s found, the layers of bureacracy or telephone press-button options are designed to deter access. In fury and frustration, that customer will want to express themselves in the strongest possible way as much to hurt the company as to obtain redress for their grievance because the inaccessibility has added to their unhappiness and most likely fueled it into rage.

All a customer wants is for your business to show that you care and a simple complaints procedure where you actively address their problem will do more for your company’s reputation in the long term than saving a bit of money on refusing a refund or some form of recompense. Handled right, an aggrieved customer could be transformed into an evangelist for your brand. Handled wrong and you’ve not only made an enemy for life - that enemy will also co-opt many more antogonists into their camp with stories about how badly you treated them.

The other point I usually make is that whether or not your organisation is engaging in social media, your customers will be talking about you online. They may be praising your produce or servicess or they may be badmouthing you to anyone and everyone.

United Airlines found out to their detriment the high cost of not addressing one customer’s problem. He was a musician whose costly, specialist guitar was apparently damaged on a flight he took with them. As his YouTube page explains, he tried to get recompense from them and was passed from pillar to post to no avail. In frustration, he finally wrote a song which he performed on a YouTube video about his bad experience with the airline.

The video became a viral sensation across the internet and has so far had over 4 million viewings. The press (including Chicago Tribune and The Guardian) picked up the story. According to The Guardian, “Days after United Breaks Guitars went viral on Youtube, United changed course and offered compensation, Carroll said. He declined and suggested they donate it to charity.”

How might United Airlines have avoided this PR fiasco? By ensuring that they have a proper and authentic process for dealing with genuine complaints in a timely way. It seems so simple and obvious, doesn’t it?

So for any business, whether or not you have a blog, in today’s connected world, your customers will find a way to badmouth you if they want to - they don’t need to wait for you to create a blog so they can leave negative comments. The answer to dealing with negative feedback online is not avoiding blogging and social media but putting in place an easily accessible and genuine complaints procedure to show your customers that you care. Who knows, if you address their grievance effectively, they might actually be singing your praises instead of singing about how rubbish you are…

~~~

Thanks to Moyra Weston and Michael Spencer for first telling me about this video.