Archive for the 'Social Media & Technology' Category

The Futurists were artists who burst onto the 20th century in 1909, led by Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, obsessed with speed, electricity and the new machine age. I went to the exhibition at the Tate Modern the other day and found it fascinating and repellent at the same time. The exhbition shows the sculptures, paintings and written manifestos of the key figures and sets them within the context of Cubism, Vorticism and the Great War. It was repellent to me because the ideology of the movement is repellent. The Futurist Manifesto of Marinetti and his gang seem like the rantings of fascists:

“9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”

Perhaps, it was easy before the First World War to glorify war and machines. But in a world that has known the horror of that war, the Holocaust and other genocides, the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Sept 11, here at the dawn of the 21st century, we are not so certain about glorious war and beautiful ideas that kill. And, of course, as a modern woman who has the right to vote and work and live pretty much as an equal with men in the Western world, the misogyny of the movement raises my hackles.

But the exhibition is also fascinating for giving an insight into what it must have been like to first experience speed and electricity. We take these for granted now, at the dawn of our new century, but in the early years of the last one, cars and electric lights were only just starting to become commonly available.

Night time became full of possibilities with electric lights - cabarets and other entertainments, decorative lights in the street and around buildings made the dark exciting and alluring. The Futurists write about how electric light transforms the human face at night into a myriad of different colours and complexions.

Speed also changed how people experienced the world - streaking past familiar scenes which were previously static, watching the world blur out of the windows of trains and automobiles. The possibilities of technology and machines excited the Futurists. One of them writes about driving his new car, feeling like a modern centaur, part man, part machine.

They tried to convey these experiences on canvas - creating streaks and lines of colour, a blur of light and shade, kaleidoscopes and fragments of dancing and movement. Their sculpture shaped half monstous, half human figures and machine-like objects swirling in motion.

Their most iconic piece, to me, is the sinister cyborg like creature inspired by a drill bit - see first photo. It has inspired a lot of our modern vision - or perhaps nightmare - of androids and cyborgs: machines that were originally created to help humanity but then turning against their creators and becoming efficient killing machines. In particular, see the second photo of a cylon soldier from the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica.

While the Futurists glorified machines and technology without question, we are much more ambivalent. Perhaps because we know now the horror of the First World War - the first war that used machines and technology (tanks, nerve gas, grenades, bombs dropped from planes, machine guns) for mass destruction - which they were still to live through. Yet, even as we carry the burden of our anxiety about technology, it continues to evolve and permeate every part of our lives.

Some philosophers have written that we are all cyborgs already, especially those of us in the so-called First World - we do not wait for the full integration of the human biological with machines to become part human, part machine: we are already there. Think about it. Most areas of our lives are mediated by machines and technology in some way. In order to go anywhere beyond our narrow neighbourhood, we use cars, buses, trains, planes. Our communications with each other are mediated through phones, email, webcams, SMS, instant messaging. Our music lives in electronic form. Our books, newspapers and knowledge are produced via digital technology. Much of business and enterprise rely on computers and the internet. The logistics of moving goods around the world and of our economy depend on computers. Without electricity, we would be lost in a dark, still and silent world.

A hundred years after the Futurists, machines and technology may not be welded to our bodies but we are so dependent on them, they may as well be.

Photo: of cylon figure from slashfilm.com

Neville Hobson, over at his blog the other day, asked why he should use Posterous.

For those of you who’ve never heard of this application, it’s a blog-like platform that enables you to blog by email. You sign up for a free Posterous account which gives you a blog at www.yourchosenname.posterous.com and you can then blog by sending an email with photos, mp3s, videos or text, and even by calling in on your phone - these items will be posted on the blog automatically. For more details of how it works, check out my review of Posterous from around this time last year.

Neville’s question - and the responses he got from various people - got me thinking about how and why I use it, when I already have this blog.

There seems to be a trend towards not just multimedia but also real time, or almost real time, communication online, facilitated by smartphones with always on internet connectivity as well as SMS (short text messaging) and MMS (multi media messaging). This is emerging as a fresh form of blogging that is being called “lifestreaming” - where you stream a record of your real life on to the online space in nearly real time. Twitter is the most well-known application that enables you to do that via text. Posterous facilitates the process in a multi-media way.

I use my blog here at Fusion View for posts which are more like articles or essays where I explore issues and topics in a considered way. These longer posts are interspersed with some video, audio and photo-slideshows. But it doesn’t feel like this is the right place for very informal snippets of what’s going on in my daily life. So that’s where lifestreaming comes in.

I’ve called my Posterous site the Fusion View Lifestream. Since I got my new Blackberry Bold the other week, I’ve really been having fun snapping shots of my garden and friends I’ve met up with as well as my recent jaunt down to Bristol - and then emailing them straight to Posterous. You can also email multiple photos in one email and it will create a little slideshow automatically. There is an automatic cross-posting function that sends the snaps to Twitter, Facebook and my Flickr account - as well as a range of other social media sites, if you were so inclined. This means that my friends and family who follow me in those spaces can see what’s going on for me within minutes of my snapping the pictures or tapping out the text on my Blackberry. But people who read my blog who may not be that interested in seeing my tomato plants or my tourist snaps of Bristol don’t have to be bothered by those more personal moments.

Occasionally, I get Posterous to automatically cross-post to Fusion View as well if it’s the right kind of vignette or mood piece that would fit with the blog and break up the longer, in depth posts.

So, if you’d like to follow my lifestream vignettes, you can subscribe to my Posterous feed or follow me on Twitter.

If you’re lifestreaming or using Posterous, why don’t you add a comment with the link to your site - I’m curious to see who else is having a go at this!

Photo: thanks to Zest-pk from flickr.com (CCL)

What contact information is on your business card apart from your name and the name of your company/ business? Traditionally, it would most likely have been your job title, your real world address and your telephone number. In the ’80s, that new fangled technology, the fax machine, meant that fax numbers were then added to the card. In the 90s, that tiny bit of card had to cope additionally with website URLs and emails and mobile phone numbers.

Is it time to de-clutter, I wonder?

Recently, I’ve come across a number of business people exchanging their Twitter @usernames, in the way that one might exchange mobile phone numbers - or including those monickers at the end of their Powerpoint presentations.

I wonder if we could reduce the verbage on our business cards simply to our names and Twitter @usernames?

OK, for those who have not yet heard of Twitter, it’s an online micro-blogging site where you can post short messages of 140 characters for the world to see on the Twitter site - either via your mobile phone or your computer. Your Twitter username is a username of your own choosing. Mine is fusionview. To “hail” someone on Twitter you send a message - or “tweet” - with @ in front of their username: so “@fusionview” would reach my Twitter inbox.

If we minimised our contact details to our @username, might that also improve our communications with people we meet other than the obvious one of de-cluttering our business cards?

People can “follow” your Twitter stream by clicking “follow” on your Twitter page and you can “follow” them back - or you could choose not to. So new people you meet as well as your friends and associates could easily find and follow you online with just your Twitter username. You can have public discussions with them - and other Twitterers - or private exchanges, if you prefer.

You would normally include in your Twitter profile a link to your website so people can find your more detailed contact information via you website Contact Me page, if they need to. On you Twitter page, all people need is a quick snapshot of who you are / what you do. People can also see on your page the kinds of things you “tweet” about or what you discuss with other Twitter users. That can actually say a lot about the kind of person you are, what you’re interested in and how you engage with others. Might this then be an alternative and more informal way to let yourself and your business be more open and accessible to new acquaintances and lonstanding friends alike than your website?

I rather like the concept of a business card that just says:

Yang-May Ooi
Writer
@fusionview

… and a way for people to encounter me online at Twitter as they might encounter me - as a friend, a writer, an avid learner about all things social media, a reluctant gardener, an unfit runner, a lover of good food… and so on, as my Twitter stream evolves.

The only thing is that we’d all be dependent on Twitter to stay afloat into the foreseeable future if it became the norm to trust our contact details to it…

Or maybe the end result will be yet another new contact format to crowd into that little bit of card as we squeeze our Twitter @usernames into the last available blank space there…

Do you use Twitter for chatting, networking, making contact with people whether in a personal or business context? Do you think there’s potential for mass take-up of Twitter as a contact tool?

Image: thanks to xotoko from flickr.com (CCL)

It was a great tutorial on how to conduct a podcast interview when Neville interviewed Silvia (@XCulture) and me about our book for his FIR podcast show this afternoon. He’s got the knack of making his interviewees feel comfortable and for asking good questions that allow you the space to express yourself easily. And I got a strong case of gadget envy when he whipped out his portable stereo digital recorder with detachable mike and sound level monitors….
 
The show will be uploaded next week - check out For Immediate Release on iTunes/Google.

Posted via email from Fusion View Lifestream

Self-employment in a cold climate

I’ve been speaking with a number of solo professionals recently and many of them told me that they have been badly affected by the economic downturn. Business was going along quite nicely until around March this year when everything seems to have dried up. In some cases, companies that had been contracting these professionals for long-term projects are now bringing that work in-house. In other cases, businesses were no longer planning more than a couple of months ahead so these self-employed professionals - who had gotten used to having work lined up for the next 10 months - are now finding that they have to live from hand to mouth, with the contract work being drip fed to them from time to time.

I asked them what they are doing to market themselves and to get themselves “out there” in these difficult times. A number of them have been going through their address books, cold calling contacts and making arrangements to meet up and network in the hope that there might be some work thrown their way — or at least some leads that they could then follow up. It was painstakingly slow and long, hard work — with as many as thirty “no, thank yous” to every one “maybe”. Depressingly, in one case, the contacts that this one professional called up said, “I’m so glad you called. I want to pick your brain. I’ve just been made redundant”. Another professional sighed and said that he really should try to get networking but he wasn’t very good at it and he really didn’t like pushing himself on other people.

What, no website?

In quite a number of cases, none of them had a website.

When I asked them why they didn’t have websites for their businesses, the responses all had a similar theme:
• business had been good up till now, they didn’t need one;
• they didn’t want to spend the money and now in the downturn, they didn’t have the money to spend;
• they had been getting all their work through contacts and existing clients so there had never been the need for a website;
• they were too busy with the work to think about marketing and commissioning a website.

Benefits of having a website

I urged them to invest the time and money in resourcing a website, especially now that they had a bit of spare time to think about what they wanted to say about themselves on a website and what they wanted for the design of it. While personal contacts and real-world networking is extremely valuable, its reach is limited to the number of people you can personally talk to or spend time with. A website - literally - makes your credentials and services available 24/7 to the whole wide world. Also, when one of your contacts recommends you to a company, they can easily include a link to your website so that that company can easily check out what you offer and your track record - which may be critical to their decision about whether or not to hire you. In fact, if you were that company and you weree considering hiring a new consultant, would you go for the one with the website you can check out or rely on a recommendation that you can’t verify in any other way?

Case studies via Twitter and Facebook

I thought that the best way to make a strong case for how important it is for self-employed professionals to have a website it to offer them some real world case studies. So I opened up Twitter and sent the following “tweet” to the whole wide world:

If you are self-employed, how important is it to have your own website? Pls help me advise some solo professionals I know

These are a couple of responses I got back within the hour:

barrieingramacc: @fusionview I have site www.barrieingram.co.uk and its helped me get networkin people get to know what you do I have got podcasts as well .

I don’t know Barrie but he caught my “tweet” because he was on Twitter. I checked his website and see that he offers “Complete Accountancy Service specifically for small business”. Now he is getting some free publicity from my blog post! By engaging online, you can definitely widen your reach as Barrie has done.

gilescolborne: @fusionview Put it like this: when was the last time you looked up a number in the Yellow Pages? And on Google?

Giles is my cousin-in-law who is a usability expert and Managing Director of cxpartners, based in Bristol. What he says is so true. I hardly look up a business in the Yellow Pages - instead I google, because Google throws up businesses actual websites and other information about them such as articles, blog posts etc whereas Yellow Pages only gives me their address and phone number. If you don’t have a website, you miss out on potential clients who may be googling right now in the hope of finding someone just like you.

My Twitter feed also automatically appears in my Facebook profile so I also received these other responses via Facebook.

Moyra Weston at 11:36pm July 1
I launched mine 2 weeks ago and it has already given me 4 positive leads. We can manage without if we have great links and networks, but it appears that a professional looking website gives credibility and allows us to spread our message - especially when we use blogs/newsletters. I’ve had a lot of feedback on mine and am definitely seen as a professional with it… www.westoncoaching.com …. it has really got me to think differently about my business and the need for others to find out about me in order to connect and take advantage of what I offer

Moyra is a client for whom my consultancy provided a website and associated blog as well as blog training. Weston Coaching is “Committed to supporting the development you need through coaching, training, consultancy and facilitation.” I’m thrilled that her website has already generated four positive leads within two weeks of launching!

Susan Macaulay at 12:38pm July 2
I think it’s great. gives people a place to go and get a bunch of information fast and easy. They can look at what they want. Saves time for you and for clients. Mine has been up about 4 years. Soon to be revamped based on experience. Haven’t used it as fully as would like to in the past, but will in the future….

Susan is a friend and Managing Director of Strike Communications, a public speaking consultant based in Dubai. She also runs Amazing Women Rock, a social network for, well, “amazing women”. Interestingly, I was going to put one of the solo professionals I met in contact with Susan before I got this message - but found that I couldn’t give Susan “a bunch of information” by merely forwarding that professional’s web address - and so I haven’t gotten around to writing Susan an email about this person yet because it’s so much more hassle for me to set out that “bunch of information” myself. Make it easy for your contacts to spread the word about you and your business by having a website.

I rest my case

So, if you’re self-employed - I hope that with these additional voices from small business owners and solo professionals, I have been able to make the case for investing in a website as soon as possible, if you don’t already have one! And please do pop back and let me know how it works out for you and your business.

Photo: thanks to Librarian By Day on flickr.com (CCL0

Many businesses are keen to engage in social media. This was very clear at the Institute of Directors event last week where I was speaking on Creating Value through Web 2.0, with Silvia Cambié and Giles Colborne. From what I have noticed in real world discussions as well as online, this interest reflects the interest of business leaders generally. Many have an awareness of blogs and Twitter and Facebook and there is a huge curiosity about how to best use these social media tools in a business context. But alongside that curiosity is also a sensible concern about how to engage appropriately in this new medium. One of the delegates at the event, Roy Graff of ChinaContact sent me a tweet via Twitter suggesting that that I discuss the Habitat case as a study in how NOT to engage in social media.

Habitat and Twitter

Habitat is a well-known upmarket furniture retailer in the UK. I first heard that they had started using Twitter via the Social Media Today site. One of the conventions in Twitter is to use “hash tags” ie too add a hash symbol # to keywords to make it easier to identify other tweets about the same topic. So, for example, if you are tweeting about the elections in Iran, you would mark your tweets with #iranelection. Habitat appeared on Twitter using all kinds of popular hash tags to mark their tweets — but their tweets had nothing to do with the keyword topic and were, instead, blatant hard sell copy pushing their furniture. The Social Media Today site sets out some great screenshots of Habitat’s Twitter feed - an example is “#iPhone Our totally desirable Spring collection now 20% off”.

Social media as a cross-cultural space

This kind of communication on Twitter showed a complete ignorance of social media culture. The best way to explain social media culture is to think about it as a cross-cultural fourth space — like another country you might visit. If you were to do business in China or India, you would take the opportunity to learn about the etiquette and cultural norms for business people in those countries. For example, you might take the time to find out what the etiquette is for taking someone out for dinner or whether it is appropriate to bow or shake hands etc. Similarly, you need to approach the social media space as a cross-cultural experience and take the time to learn about the nuances of communicating within that context.

Authenticity

So, one of the most highly prized values in the social media space is authenticity. If you are going to use the hash tag #iPhone then you need to be tweeting about something relating to that mobile phone device. To use it as a way to “spin” people intp reading your sales advertisement shows a huge disrespect to those around you. Twitterers were outraged by Habitat’s forcing their sales pitch into their conversatiaon space. Think of how infuriating it is to receive junk phone calls with recorded messages selling you stuff just as you are sitting down for a meal. Or your home fax machine ringing and churning away in the middle of night with junk faxes till they’ve used up all your paper. Twitterers felt the same sense of violation. I believe that at one point Habitat was even using the #iranelection hashtag. The furore in the Twitterverse was palpable. It was like being door-stepped by someone asking for your help in a good cause who then suddenly switches to trying to sell you Viagra. Habitat had become a spammer without even realising it.

Habitat blames the intern

On 24 June, Social Media Today posted an apology from Habitat, which said, “The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat.”. On 25 June, Brand Republic reported that Habitat was now blaming an intern, quoting a spokesman as saying, “The hashtags were uploaded without Habitat’s authorisation by an overenthusiastic intern who did not fully understand the ramifications of his actions. He is no longer associated with Habitat.”

I’m not sure that Habitat has really extricated itself from this mess by this “blame it on the intern” message – and, in fact, I think they’ve dug themselves deeper into the doo-doo. Many others seem to think so too. Check out the Twitter hashtag #habitatfail for the reactions of Twitterers. In my view, for a big corporation to blame a hapless intern shows a great moral cowardice.

Assuming there was an intern…

Let’s give Habitat the benefit of the doubt and assume there really was an intern in the first place. What is implied to the world by this simple blame statement: It wasn’t us, gov - it was the intern’s fault”?

An intern, as one of the most junior members of any team, needs to be - and should have been – properly supervised and trained, as well as mentored appropriately to do their job well. For the big corporation to dump them into any role with no training and say, Get on with it and if you screw up, you’re out on your ear, is bad business and bad ethics. Even if Habitat had given him clear initial instructions about the appropriate way to engage on Twitter, they should not have walked away and left him to his own devices without checking back to make sure what he was doing was “authorised”. How difficult is it to check your own Twitter page? The intern’s supervisor could have done that without even getting up from his computer!

A leader of a team is the responsible for how his / her team behaves and the quality of their work. He/ she is also responsible for the team’s well-being. If anyone is responsible, it is the intern’s supervisor – and that supervisor’s line manager and so on, all the way up to the Head of Communications. Because if that intern’s supervisor isn’t doing their job properly in managing that intern, there is an issue there that they themselves are not being properly managed by their line manager, and so on right up to the top.

At another level, the question that comes to my mind is: How much respect does Habitat have for the millions of people who engage on Twitter if they leave their Twitter communications strategy to an untrained, unsupervised intern? The message seems to be: Our Head of Communications is much too busy and important handling TV and traditionally respectable communications channels to even spare a thought about all those people engaged in the social media space - let alone a carefully thought out strategy - so let’s just put this junior onto it and that’ll be good enough. So, Twitterers, that’s all you’re worth to Habitat – the cost of a cheap intern’s time.

I’d be interested to see how Habitat’s recruitment figures pan out in the next little while, too. If you are a young person looking for an internship after this fiasco, would Habitat the kind of company you want to work for? Even if you’re in middle management or some other more senior level than an intern, would you want to work for a company that shows this level of inauthenticity.

But do we believe there was an intern?

My views above work on the hypothesis that there was really an intern. But, given Habitat’s performance so far in the Twitterverse, can we even be confident that they are being authentic in even claiming that there was an intern? It sounds to me as believable as, The dog ate my homework.

Practical tips on how to avoid becoming a spammer

How might Habitat have done things differently? In my view, there are some simple steps to take if your business is considering extending your communications opportunities into this fourth cultural space:
• Take the time to scout out the way that people are already behaving and communicating in this space
• Engage some professional guidance from someone who is a native of this space.
• Draw up a strategy for how you can start engaging in a phased way, with opportunities to review and adjust your strategy along the way. The key is not to rush in waving your banner wildly but to slowly build up relationships and trust before making more assertive moves.
• Put in place a proper team, with all the usual tools that you would use to manage a team working on a real world project - objectives, supervision, appraisal, milestones, end date and so on.

You will notice that you could easily apply those four steps to a cross-cultural project where you were aiming to expand your business into another country. Read through the bullets again and this time picture China or India or another region that is culturally different from your own. Taking the time to understand and respect another’s culture is the best way to avoid giving offence - and to avoid becoming a spammer.

Photo: thanks to david on flickr.com (CCL)

Everyone is talking about the power of citizen journalism these days. Social media tools that allow instant publication, such as blogging and Twitter, enable anyone with access to the Internet to report on what is happening around them. In many cases citizen journalists have scooped the news ahead of traditional news media — e.g. the ordinary guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time with his mobile phone to take a photo of the plane that crashed into the Hudson River in New York earlier this year.

There has been a lot of hand wringing by media commentators and the traditional newsgathering organisations. If anyone can be a journalist nowadays — and be happy to report on events for free — then what is the future for professional journalists with years of training who need to earn a living while reporting the news?

Last night, watching the rising tidal wave of news and speculation on the Internet about Michael Jackson’s death was an object lesson in why we still need serious journalists and why we need to find a way to continue properly remunerating them for fact-checked investigative reporting of the news.

I checked out my Twitter stream late last night after dinner and noticed a lot of Twitterers mourning the passing of Michael Jackson, posting “RIP Michael Jackson” and honouring his memory with reminiscences of his wonderful music and talent. Naturally, I checked out the news websites immediately — the BBC, CNN in particular, as well as newspaper sites such as The Guardian. None of the news websites were actually making the statement that Michael Jackson was dead — instead, they were reporting that he had been rushed to hospital and was not breathing. A couple of them said that he was in a coma.

I set up a live blogging event using Scribble Live to record my “in the moment” responses to the unfolding news and speculation: Michael Jackson – Dead or Alive? (The complete live blog post also updated in real time here on my blog). At the same time, I had the BBC live video stream open on another tab in my browser and was listening to their continuing commentary and updates. I tweeted my own comments on what was happening — that the news sources were not saying that he was dead although the Twitterverse were already mourning him.

The BBC news report was very careful to use phrases such as “it is reported that Michael Jackson is dead ” or “reports say”. They kept emphasising that they did not themselves yet have “independent confirmation”. What was particularly interesting to me was that it was another traditional news website that was reporting the death, the LA times, as well as an online entertainment site, TMZ. The BBC WAS at pains to say that these news sources were very well respected and were reputable sites. However, they were unwilling to make the definitive statement that Michael Jackson was dead until they had obtained their own independent confirmation.

While I was live blogging all this, a number of other people on the Internet had obviously found my site as Scribble Live was telling me that up to 38 people were “watching” my life blogging. Some of them added their own comments to say that Jackson was in a coma and others were wanting to know whether he was dead or not, and whether it was 100% confirmed that he was dead.

This was a fascinating experience. If I had been at work or in a party space and we had heard this kind of news, we’d have turned on the TV or radio and while the reports would be coming in, we’d all be wondering and chatting and talking about Michael Jackson and what was the latest moment by moment news. As I live blogged my views and what I was hearing from the BBC, it felt exactly as if I was in that sort of environment, albeit with people I didn’t personally know. It is such a human instinct to gather at times of crisis to find out what’s going on. And tools like Twitter and Scribble Live make it so easy to gather in a way that makes geography irrelevant.

In terms of the news sourcing, what was interesting to me was this. The LA Times, a respected and reputable news source, said that Michael Jackson was dead. Did I — and many others around the world — believe them? Instinctively, I was waiting for the BBC’s confirmation so at some level, I evidently did not trust the LA Times as much as I trust the BBC. From the reaction of other people online, this seems to have been their response as well. I believe that the LA Times reported the death at around 10:30 PM London time but the BBC only confirmed this fact through their independent verification at approximately 11:46 PM. So in terms of news reporting, the LA Times scooped the BBC on this story — but it was only when I heard the BBC’s, authoritative voice say “It has now been confirmed that Michael Jackson is in fact dead” that I was ready to face the reality of the pop star’s passing.

It was also interesting to note that the BBC’s live report remarked that there was a lot of rumour and speculation on the Internet and via Twitter during the few hours following Jackson’s admission to hospital. It seemed a very 21st century moment — while we were watching the news, the news was also watching us.

For me, the significance of this is event that, while many of us “ordinary folk” can publish our views and opinions online instantaneously, this kind of interaction is rife with the potential for rumour and speculation. At best, we are generally at one remove from the news. There are of course ordinary people who are caught up in extraordinary events and have the opportunity to blog or twitter about their experience in the moment — such as what has been happening in Iran — and I do not mean at all to disrespect what they’re communicating to the world about their personal experiences. I just want to emphasise that trained journalists adhere to a rigourous code of ethics, including vigourous fact checking before making their reports and this is an important and valuable function — it is sometimes better to be late with the correct facts than early with a sensational scoop.

Photo: thanks to groupieblog

• 11:16 PM fusionview - Watching unfolding news and speculation online about whether Michael Jackson has died
• 11:17 PM fusionview - Saw people saying how tragic it was on Twitter about 20 mins ago
• 11:18 PM fusionview - Checked out news sites BBC and CNN and all they said was that he had been rushed to hospital not breathing
• 11:19 PM fusionview - Ustream claimed live coverage - “Ustream Michael Jackson passes away- live coverage- www.ustream.tv“
• 11:19 PM fusionview - But too many people on the Ustream site made streaming freeze
• 11:20 PM fusionview - Many in Twitterverse claiming he’s dead and posting RIP etc
• 11:29 PM fusionview - Michael Jackson taken to hospital bit.ly
• 11:30 PM fusionview - Interesting to see difference between professional journalists and social media observers.
• 11:30 PM fusionview - Journos cautious until facts confirmed
• 11:30 PM fusionview - Journos use terms like “reports”/ “reported”. Cautious tone. BBC report what other news agencies said. But “no independent confirmation”
• 11:34 PM fusionview - CNN reporting Jackson in coma. BBC “not clear what the position is”
• 11:35 PM fusionview - Live BBC online stream now filling time with review of Michael Jackson’s career while waiting for more news
• 11:38 PM fusionview - LA Times reported Jackson dead but BBC don’t believe them. They want “independent confirmation”
• 11:38 PM fusionview - Is LA Times less reputable than BBC?
• 11:39 PM fusionview - Perhaps that’s why the world tends to believe BBC as dependable? They won’t say anything till they themselves are absolutely sure
• 11:39 PM fusionview - This is a fascinating object lesson in why we need real journos
• 11:40 PM fusionview - Fans gathering outside hospital
• 11:40 PM fusionview - TMZ and LA Times apparently have inside line to hospital staff, say BBC
• 11:41 PM fusionview - BBC careful to emphasise TMZ and LA Times very respected
• 11:41 PM fusionview - Assoc Press also now reporting Jackson dead
• 11:41 PM fusionview - BBC still not committing
• 11:41 PM fusionview - Hospital wouldn’t give info to BBC
• 11:42 PM fusionview - Anyone else out there have any views?
• 11:43 PM fusionview - Yes, coma seems a certainty
• 11:44 PM fusionview - BBC just confirming he’s dead
• 11:44 PM fusionview - BBC: “We can now confirm…”
• 11:44 PM fusionview - BBC: we have confirmaiton now he has died aged 50
• 11:45 PM fusionview - Is news true and 100% only when BBC confirms it?
• 11:45 PM fusionview - BBC: rumours spreading before confirmation due to Twitter & social media
• 11:45 PM fusionview - So even while we’re watching BBC, they are watching us
• 11:46 PM fusionview - RIP Michael Jackson
• 11:46 PM Courtney Rafter - hearing he’s in a coma
• 11:47 PM fusionview - Yes, BBC has confirmed he’s dead
• 11:48 PM fusionview - BBC live stream news.bbc.co.uk
• 11:52 PM fusionview - I’m now closing this live blogging feed. Thanks to everyone who has been watching and adding comments. My condolences to Michael Jackson’s family, friends & fans

Our talk on Creating Value Through Web 2.0 last night was as interesting for my co-presenters Silvia Cambie and Giles Colborne and myself as for the delegates who came along. We had a lot of great questions and good discussion coming out of this very topical issue, helped along by the panel chairman David Wootton.

First off, our slides can be downloaded as a pdf in the box below so if you were at the talk and want a copy of them, please click the link for the download - and if you were not there but would like to see what we discussed, you’re welcome, too.

Now, onto the debrief. Many of the delegates at this Institute of Directors event represented small to medium sized enterprises, with a number of freelancers and also solo professionals in the mix. We had a lot of the lively discussion during the question time and also in the pre- and post-event drinks. I thought it would be useful to continue the discussions online here on my blog for a wider audience as well as for the delegates who were there last night. So here are some of what struck me as the burning issues that came out of the presentation and discussions last night:

# Should we participate in social media?

Web 2.0 and social media is here to stay with millions of people around the world engaging in social networks, blogs, Twitter, forums and more. Traditional broadcast media such as newspapers, magazine, radio and TV will still be around and very influential but are evolving and finding new ways to engage with their audiences through the multiple channels now becoming available through the web. Traditional PR will still be valuable but it is worth considering how to integrate a social media strategy into your businesses communications strategy. Even if, after an assessment of the relevance of social media to your business, you decide that it is not the right medium of communication for your business, you need to at least monitor what is being said about you and your business online and be prepared to act and engage with those commentators in an appropriate way.

# If we participate, where should we go - Facebook, blogs, Twitter?

The most sensible place to enage online is where you customers or stakeholders are. If they are on Facebook, then it’s worth looking at how you can engage with them there. Even if your business doesn’t blog, do your customers or key influencers in your sector blog? If so, how might you engage with those bloggers in a genuine way?

# How can you tell if anything you find online is fake eg fake rave reviews of a product or company?

Yes, there is a lot of fake stuff and rubbish out there! How can you tell if someone you meet at a party is a fraudster or conman or raving psycho? There are “tells” usually - especially if you spend some more time with them. Similarly, there are also “tells” online - you can check out previous blog posts which will tell you about the blogger over a period of time, you can Google someone for more background information, you can judge overall tone and content and so on.

# Is there scope for using social media in a business to business context?

Most business blogs we hear about tend to be in the consumer context but many of the delegates offer services and products to other businesses. I was able to share the case study of THFC Space, the blog that I manage for The Housing Finance Corporation (THFC) where I work part-time - as a not for profit lender lending over £1.5billion to the social housing sector, THFC Space’s target community are Finance Directors, Chief Executives and Treasury Managers within this niche sector. Social media is about peer-to-peer communication so THFC Space engages the company’s peer group - as guest bloggers as well as readers. This creates a network of experts sharing specialist views with each other and positions THFC as a lender that has in depth knowledge about the hot issues that are affecting its customers’ businesses.

An article I wrote with a detailed discussion of the THFC Space project can be downloaded as a pdf in the box below.

# What about Return on Investment (ROI)?

As small and medium enterprises, a hot topic was the ROI of social media. How can you judge the success and outcomes of social media? What about the time it takes to engage online?

Well, there are many tools to analyse the success of a social media project eg the number of visitors, the number of times a pdf is downloaded, the geographic location of visitors, the number of links from other blogs. You can see if pretty much real time which blog posts are popular and how many comments are coming in about a topic you’ve discussed.

Taking a step back from social media, how do you measure the ROI of giving your time for free to say, write an article or give a talk such as the one we were all engaging in last night. Giles, Silvia and I spent time preparing and meeting together then coming to the event - how many hours of work did that represent? And what was the ROI for us? Or the ROI for the delegates taking the time out from their evenings to learn something valuable for their business? I would suggest that the ROI for social media is in the same ball park as the ROI for such activities. For me, the ROI of real world events and of my blog / engaging in social media are very similar - raising my profile as a writer, increasing my knowledge and expertise in my field of interest and networking with others with similar interests: all valuable in different and sometimes unpredictable ways - and sometimes, even resulting in commissions for work.

If you were at the talk last night and have any comments or questions you’d like to add, I’d love to hear from you - please add a comment below or email me via my contact page. If you weren’t there, I’d love to hear your views, too, so please do join the discussion as well.

And before I sign off, I’d really like to thank Mei Sim Lai for inviting us to speak and for making it such a fun and lively event!

Download our presentation and also an article on THFC Space from the box below:

If the box above is not showing, you can click on the following link to download the pdfs - http://www.box.net/shared/82r76olov8

I’ve been invited by the Institute of Directors (IoD) - along with my co-author Silvia Cambie and usability expert Giles Colborne - to give a talk on how businesses can take advantage of Web 2.0 to build networks and communities around their products, services and brands. The event will take place on Monday 22 June at 6.30pm at the Guildhall in the City of London.

The details are below, with booking information at the end. If you are able to come along, do add a comment to let me know and I’ll keep an eye out for you. Or just come and say hi afterwards.

Also, if you have any specific questions or topics you think it would be helpful for us to cover, please do add a comment. We’ll see if we can cover it in the talk or in the question time afterwards.

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Creating Value through Web 2.0

Venue: City Marketing Suite, Guildhall, Basinghall Street, London EC2P 2EJ
Time: 6.30pm to 8.30pm on Monday 22 June 2009

Internet communication is evolving the way we do business. Blogging, podcasting and social networks like Linkedin and Facebook are extending the ways we engage with people via digital means.

Web 2.0 is creating a business environment based on knowledge sharing and collaboration. The cyberspace is a new landscape with its own cultures and accepted rules of behaviour.

Social media offer businesses a powerful means of building networks and communities around their products, services and brands. However it is not a simple matter of ‘Build it and they will come’. A strategic approach is needed to produce ‘sticky’ content and create value from on-line interactions.

The speakers will give an overview of the social media and social networks used by businesses. They will introduce ways of engaging effectively with on-line communities and will discuss the intersection of commerce and social networking.

Silvia Cambie ( Director, Chanda Communications ) and Yang-May Ooi are authors of “International Communications Strategy Developments in Cross-Cultural Communications, PR and Social Media” to be published in July 2009 by Kogan Page. Silvia is a cross- cultural communicator and a journalist. Yang-May is a writer specialised in social media and a blogger.

Giles Colborne is an expert in User Experience. He is Managing Director of cxpartners and former President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association.

Tickets: £25 for IoD members inclusive of VAT of £3.26 and £28 for non members inclusive of VAT of £3.65
Contact: Mei Sim Lai OBE DL, Hon Secretary, IoD City Branch, IoD Hub, 35 New Broad Street, London EC2M 1NH
Tel: 020 7194 8385, Mobile: 07903 153793, Fax: 020 7194 8386, Email: MeiSim@LaiPeters.org

Photo: thanks to Daniel F. Pigatto from flickr.com (CCL)