Archive for the 'Social Media & Technology' Category

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.

———–

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)

YouTube, the video sharing site, sent out a call for musicians from around the world to audition for the first internet symphony orchestra in the world. Performers sent in videos of themselves playing a piece by a Chinese composer Tan Dun, specially composed for the event. The winners were selected, based on their YouTube performance and the winners were invited to perform the piece live at Carnegie Hall in New York.

This is one of the many reasons why I love the internet and social media!

Here is a mashup of the symphony made up of clips from the audition “tapes”:

This is the performance at Carnegie Hall:

You can also find out more and watch videos about the whole process at the YouTube Symphony site.

The great thing about email is that it’s very easy to drop an e-mail to someone, knowing that they can pick it up at their leisure and respond at their leisure. Unlike the phone, you don’t both have to stop what you’re doing in order to make and take the call at the same time.

But the problem with e-mail is that you had to be sitting at the computer to type out the text of your message and then to send it. There have been times when I have been on my way to work or just out and about without access to a computer — and certainly with no possibility of sitting down and typing a detailed message — when I have remembered that I need to contact someone to tell them some particular information. I could phone them using my mobile phone but it would typically be that time of day or evening when they would be either busy at work, in a meeting or in bed asleep — or it’s the kind of message that doesn’t really warrant my interrupting them in the middle of what they are doing. So I usually say to myself, “I must remember to e-mail them when I get home/ to work when I’ll be at a computer.” And, often, I would forget to do it!

Wouldn’t it be useful if we had a voicemail line where it worked like email? You could send them a quick voice-email that they could pick up at their leisure and responds to at their leisure. It would be handy in situations where you wanted to send them a message on the fly while you are hurrying along — and you didn’t need to specifically interrupt them with a phone call. Or if you find texting fiddly or if your message is going to be longer than 160 characters. Or you’re not very good at typing and the whole process of typing a detailed message is very laborious.

There are a couple of ways that I have discovered that can help in this kind of situation. They are Jaxtr and Dial2do, which are online applications that interface with your mobile phone - and land line, too. I will look at them in separate blog posts over the next couple of weeks. They each work in different ways and offer different functions.

First, Jaxtr.

This is primarily an online interface that allows you to make cheap international calls from one of around 50 listed countries, including USA, UK, Malaysia, Australia and many European and Asian countries. You can signup for a free account which has an online voicemail function. If you want to make cheap calls or receive calls that can be forwarded to your landline or mobile phone, you need to register your phone and buy credit - but to receive calls to the Jaxtr voicemail can be done with the free account.

You will be alerted when you receive a voicemail by an automatically generated e-mail from Jaxtr so you can login to your account online and listen to the message. One of the advantages of a Jaxtr account is that people in other countries can call you at rates local to them. So your friends or family abroad can send you a voicemail from their phones at cheap local rates whatever time of day or night, wherever they are, without worrying about time zone differences or needing to be at computer.

The other cool thing is that you can put a Jaxtr widget on your blog or website which people can click on to initiate a call from their phone. They type in their telephone number and Jaxtr calls their phone to connect it to your voicemail line. The first call is free and then Jaxtr gives them a local number to call for subsequent calls. If they have an all inclusive package on their mobile phone or their home phone has free minutes, those subsequent calls will essentially be free for them to make.

One downside for some may be that you have to go online and listen to the messages online so you will need a broadband connection that can comfortably support audio streaming and a computer with a sound card. Another might be that while the caller may leave the message for you while they are on the fly, YOU can only pick up the message when you are at YOUR broadband-connected computer.

You can give my Jaxtr voicemail line a try on my Contact page at www.fusionview.co.uk/contact.

I also add a line in my email signature: Don’t have time to email? Send me a voicemail instead @ www.jaxtr.com/yangmayooi

The main difference between Jaxtr and the other service I’ll be explaining in a later post, Dial2do, is that the message remains as an audio message for the recipient. Also, it is an application set up by you as the recipient.

Let me know if you give this service and go - and also what you and your friends think about it’s usefulness or otherwise, whether you use it for voicemail or to make and receive calls.

BTW, I’m not commissioned by Jaxtr in any way. This is my personal view based on how useful I’ve found this service.

Well, there’s nothing like writing it down and putting it out there to make something happen. I recently blogged about taking up running again, using Podrunner Intervals, a podcast that plays music at alternating slow and fast beats to help you with interval training. Within a day of my posting that up, my friend and blogging massage therapist, Melanie, dropped me a comment inviting me to join her for her second London Marathon in April 2010. My response was: Are you crazy!? But, still, I was chuffed to have her encouragement for my baby steps in running — especially as she is a superfit athlete.

A few days later, another friend, Sue, also learned about my new found fitness addiction from my blog and invited me to join her for a 5K fun run at the end of April. Sue is a homoeopath who lives round the corner from me and we are very close to Dulwich Park, where the fun run will be taking place. Since I go for my baby runs in that park every week, I had no any excuse not to sign up for the fun run. But the clincher was that Sue and I agreed to reward ourselves after the event by going for a slap up meal — how could I refuse that incentive! I have now sent off my cheque and application form…

Part of the thrill of starting a new hobby is to go shopping. I headed to London City Runner in my lunch hour and got myself a new pair of running shoes (Saucony) with stability support for my flat feet and weak ankles. I’ve also got some running shorts and a running T-shirt, both made of what they call “performance material” — silky, smooth to the touch: presumably to reduce the wind drag on my speedy pace of a mile in 20 minutes (yes, that’s called “walking pace”)… so while I huff and puff round the Park, regardless of my feeble performance, I look REALLY GOOD!

I have to confess that this new hobby has been inspired in the most part by my love of social media. While surfing the net the other week, I came across a number of podcasts and blogs about running and triathlons. Specifically, I typed in the word “Zen” into iTunes, thinking that I might like to listen to some podcasts about meditation and relaxation. One of the shows that came up was Zen and the Art of the Triathlon, a fantastic podcast by a triathlete called Brett living in Texas. It’s a really free-form show with him talking about training, cycling, swimming, testing out different kinds a gear. He has a very laid-back manner and a lovely energy that for some reason I find very inspiring. After listening to a couple of shows, I just wanted to get out there and run! (I would also love to swim and cycle but organising that in London is a bit more tricky than popping on my running shoes and trundling down to the park. But we’ll see… ) In addition to Brett, there is a huge community of running/ triathlete podcasters and bloggers out there and I’ve been getting a lot of tips and inspiration from many of them — if you want to check them out, just type in “running” or “triathlon” in iTunes or Google Blog Search.

What is interesting is that I have tried running off and on over the past few years but it has never really bitten and gotten hold of me in the same way as it has recently. I put that down definitely to finding the online community of runners/ triathletes. I’d always thought of myself as a non-sporty, literary type — not at all like those sporty, super athletes that think nothing of running across the desert or swimming the Channel. But listening to their podcasts about the pain that they experience in their training or the exhaustion that they have to fight through or about times when they just have to give up - as well as their enjoyment of the landscape that they are cycling or running through - has let me see them as ordinary people who have built up their stamina and skills over time and experience. It all seems less intimidating and more like something that even I could do!

So no sitting meditation or relaxation. Instead, I’m finding Zen in physical activity. Who knows where this will lead me. Watch this space…

Photo: thanks to klbw from flickr.com (CCL)

Barack Obama continues to use social media with confidence and style. Within weeks of becoming President-Elect, he is maintaining his presence online with the ease of a 21st century man, reaching out to Americans - and the world - via a weekly YouTube address.

Previous US presidents and the leaders of other nations have used radio and television - was it Roosevelt who instituted a weekly radio “fireside chat” with the nation? Today, social media allows anyone to deliver their message to a national and global audience unmediated by the press or advertisers. It makes sense for Obama to use YouTube during the transitional months - there can only be one President at any given time so he cannot broadcast a weekly address on the traditional broadcast media without undermining the sitting President. YouTube is the perfect alternative, enabling him to continue communicating his agenda in this hiatus period while connecting with the younger demographic his campaign was so successful in capturing via a thoroughly 21st century, up to the minute, “hot” medium.

Here is his Thanksgiving address.

More to explore

The Social Media President

Barack Obama’s ChangeDotGov YouTube channel

Our pro-bono blog project Dulwich OnView was the subject of a conference for the heritage sector the other week, bringing together representatives from the major musuems and cultural centres around the UK, including The Barbican, The Globe Theatre, The Royal Academy, The Natural History Museum, Canterbury Catheral and more - all keen to find out about how we put together the project and how we make it the success that it is.

One of our team editors, writer and museum strategist Steve Slack, described the day for our Dulwich OnView readers and I’ve poached his post (with his permission, of course) to share here with you.

Steve writes:

Dulwich OnView is all about celebrating people and culture in the Dulwich area. Last week we tried celebrating ourselves, for a change.

We’ve just held a successful gathering of the Membership Membership Forum at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The DOV (Dulwich OnView) co-editors gave an extended case-study about why and how we set up this online magazine and why we think it works for us, for the Friends and for Dulwich Picture Gallery itself.

Here’s a snap of us about to present. Left to right are: Alix Slater (convenor of the MMF), Bernard Hunter, standing (Trustee of the Gallery who kindly introduced us), Ingrid Beazley, Steve Slack, Sally-Ann Johnson, Angie MacDonald and Yang-May Ooi (chair).

The delegates at the conference were mostly membership, marketing and development professionals from some of the most prestigious arts and heritage venues in the country. It was great for us that so many turned out to hear our case study and were eager to learn more about what we are doing.

It was also really encouraging for us to have so many people agreeing that what we’ve done is worthwhile. We – the writers of the Dulwich OnView blog – all left the gallery on Friday feeling really proud of what we’ve achieved as a team of volunteers.

The Dulwich OnView model won’t work for all museums, of course. The Gallery is unique and as a result so are the Friends and this magazine. But we certainly hope it was food for thought for those who attended.

Well done us. A great big pat on the back. We’re also filled with enthusiasm for the future as well. 2009 is going to be a great year for Dulwich OnView.

Related articles:

Dulwich OnView makes impact in heritage sector

How Dulwich OnView came about - Phoneblog

Photo: thanks to Steve Slack (with permission)

After about 2 1/2 weeks of being off line, we have managed to ditch our broadband service provider Tiscali in favour of O2 and we are finally connected again to friends, family and The World!

In the first few days of being off line, I thought it might be quite refreshing not to be always available, always connected, always wired. I decided to make the best of the situation by spending my evenings and weekends reading, catching up with friends on phone or meeting face-to-face and taking the time to do other things that did not involve sitting at the computer. And for a time it was quite relaxing not to have to deal with e-mails or instant chat messages popping up on the computer screen at regular intervals. I also re-discovered the joy of sitting in my favourite armchair with a book and a glass of wine on a cold winter evening.

But after a little while, it felt like we were on a desert island and out of the loop and I couldn’t resist the urge to check e-mails. We managed to stay in touch by accessing our e-mail accounts on my partner’s iPhone — which is great for reading e-mails but a bit fiddly and clumsy for writing anything more than a few lines. Also pretty soon, unless I regularly checked e-mails via my sister’s computer or at work, my inbox would become bloated and unmanageable, with email upon email piling in at an unstoppable pace.

It also became very frustrating not being able to keep my blogs updated. I did manage one short audio podcast by phone but I prefer to write my blog posts and having to “perform” the phoneblog all in one take is somewhat stressful and not something that I wanted to do regularly. Not being able to blog made me realise how much it is a part of my life and how much it connects me with other bloggers and my readers who engage with me online.

I also usually keep in touch with my sister and a number of other friends by Skype. My sister and I have a video chats most days in a week — the conversations are usually about nothing much and are the equivalent of having a bit of the natter over the garden fence in the real world but I enjoy them as a way of staying in touch. We still managed to chat regularly on the phone that it’s just not the same — there seems something formal about a phone call these days and of course, you don’t have the fun of seeing the other person in real time.

We were invited to dinner at a friends place and I realised that I couldn’t check the train times online as I would normally do. I also had to dig out the old tattered A-to-Z to work out the directions to her house instead of merely typing in her postcode to Google Maps and printing off the map and handy directions.

My calendar and diary are online, as is my task list. So being off-line meant that my whole life, literally, fell apart as I had no idea what I was doing all where I was meant to be on any given day. I had to hurriedly dig out a paper diary and transfer all my appointments and tasks from the online applications onto it. (I did used to back everything up onto my computer at home, syncing the online applications with Outlook, but that didn’t help me when I had to check my calendar and tasks at work but had updated my home computer in the meantime without it syncing with the online version.)

My parents in Malaysia don’t have a computer so we keep in touch by fax. The only thing is that I fax them via e-mail, using faxtastic.co.uk, which also allows me to receive faxes as e-mails. So being off-line meant that I was also disconnected from them.

There was also a day when I would have liked to have worked from home so that I could go to a doctor’s appointment — and because of remote access to my work computer is, I would normally have been able to do that. However, being off-line, meant that I had to postpone the appointment to another time and go into the office instead.

What’s more, I couldn’t even do my grocery shopping, which I normally do online, nor could I shop for books and DVDs from Amazon. I actually had to go into physical shops to do all that!

It really has been quite startling, these last couple of weeks, as it has really revealed how dependent I am on being connected to everyone and everything via the Internet. It was only about 10 years ago that I had first heard about this Internet thingy and at that time, I wasn’t very convinced as to its usefulness. Is it just me that I am a net Holick? Or is this how everyone runs their lives too these days?

Photo: thanks to elvis_payne from flickr.com (CCL)

If anyone is still sceptical about the power of social media, all you have to do is take a look at its role in the making of America’s first African American president. Of all the candidates, Barack Obama has probably been the most socially connected online throughout the Democratic nomination race and also in the last year going head to head with John MCain. So, what platforms was he using and what effect did they have on the outcome of the election?

Back in the summer of 2007, I spotted that Obama had signed up for a Twitter account so that his fans and followers could keep up to date with his every movement. As of this week, you can see the “tweets” alerting his followers of the last frenetic activity on his campaign trail as he tried to squeeze as much face time with the public as possible.

The tweets link to live video on his very own social network my.barackobama.com, developed with the input of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Obama also has a Facebook page with over a million “friends” and a Facebook application as well as a presence on MySpace. TechPresident.com gives a good analysis of these three social networks in “You’ve Got a Friend in Barack Obama”.

There is an official Obama Blog on his website, run by staffers and with a range of multimedia content, including live video such as his victory speech streamed via social networking video site Ustream, as well as YouTube videos.

Beyond this handful of tools, you can see on his blog links to “Obama Everywhere” - other platforms where he has an online presence, including interactive opportunities via mobile phone.

But a bunch of social media tools in themselves are not going to make a president all by themselves. The key is how they were used by the Obama campaign. Supporters, fans and followers were encouraged to take an action to show their support for the campaign - whether by organising local events or giving a donation, however small or large, or raising funds. According to the BBC, Obama’s online campaign “attracted more than three million donors. They donated about $650m (£403m) - more than both presidential contenders in 2004 combined.” With an overflowing war chest, he could out-do McCain by buying more airtime in the traditional broadcast media and also extend his own on-the-ground real world contact through more local outreach offices than the Republican campaign.

The BBC also reports that “Mr Obama had an unprecedented level of support among young people and new voters in the 2008 election. He won the votes of those under 30 by an impressive 66% to 31%, much higher than in any previous election. He also has a huge majority of those who voted for the first time, who supported him by 68% to 31%.” The Washington Post comments that the Millenials (those under 30) “are migrating toward each other, regardless of race or ethnicity. … (They) may have found their first president — one who engages them in their own space.”

Obama’s success was not entirely due to social media but he used it smartly in conjunction with other communication tools. Broadcast media is still hugely influencial and there’s nothing that will replace face to face human contact whether it’s through speeches at rallies or simply walking amont the people and kissing babies. But social media broadened his reach to those people he might not have otherwise been able to connect with and it also enabled ordinary people to do small things which came together as a whole to contibute to an enormous win.

Picture: screenshot of the official Obama website

I used to type by pecking two-fingered at the keyboard — it was very laborious and painful, hunching over the letters with my head nodding up and down as I checked between the screen and keyboard every few seconds. Finally, I taught myself to touch type using a book from Pitman’s Secretarial College, which was a long tiresome process in itself over the course of three months. It paid off, however, as I slowly increased my typing speed over time from 20 words per minute to around 70 — 80. Touch typing helped me write my novel is easily, enabled me to do my job as a lawyer more efficiently and these days, means I can churn out e-mails, documents and blog posts very quickly. However, the downside is that spending hours on end at the computer during office hours and then in my own time in the evenings typing away means that my hands and elbows get tired and cramped. My shoulders and neck are often stiff and achey. Also, being stuck in a sitting position for long periods means that my legs and back are also badly affected.

I am guessing that this is a common experience for many people. All the discomfort that comes from having to sit and type in order to communicate on the computer takes the joy out of surfing the net and connecting with friends, doesn’t it? Well, for those of you who are fed up with typing, salvation is at hand!

I have just installed the latest speech to text software from Dragon Naturally Speaking and I am dictating this blog post while wandering around my study, occasionally standing by the window to watch the world go by. I hardly have to touch the keyboard as the program types out everything that I dictate and if I want to make an amendment, I can give it voice commands to do so for me. The version that I am using is the “Preferred” version 10 which comes with a wireless headset. It is very intuitive to use and has a huge vocabulary — it has recognised place names like Dulwich and Norwood, proper names like Joan Baez and John Steinbeck and unusual words like chorizo. I can give it voice commands to move around web pages and also control the keyboard. One of the other functions I like about it is that if I am away from my study, I can dictate into a digital recorder and then later, can next be recorded to my computer and Dragon will transcribe the audio file into text.

When you first install the program, you have to spend about 10 — 15 minutes training it to get used to your voice. Initially, it felt a bit strange “talking to” the computer and I was a bit shy! However, after a few minutes I got quite into it and now it seems the most natural thing in the world — in particular, because I use the wireless headset and tend to do my dictating while looking out of the window, it does not feel as if I am “talking to” the computer. The great thing is that I can speak at more or less a conversational pace and it is accurate upwards of 95% of the time, provided I enunciate clearly. In fact, it is much quicker for me now — one week in — to dictate than to touch type because the program is so much more accurate than my typing e.g. it doesn’t transpose letters or hit two keys at the same time!

I think to make the best use of this program, it is a good idea to have an outline in your mind of the structure and flow of your article, blog post or e-mail so that you do not have to spend much time afterwards editing and/or moving text around. Normally, I would have to do some minimal editing and rewriting just to tidy up anything that I have typed anyway, so having to do that at the end of a dictated text isn’t such a big problem — it only becomes a pain if you have to do substantial rewriting on your dictated text.

Being able to dictate text easily and accurately has really made blogging and e-mailing so much more fluid and less physically tiring. I am also more inclined to flesh out my e-mails to my friends because it doesn’t involve tiresome typing. As for blogging, it is helping me stay prolific and engaged.

So, if you are tempted to try Dragon Naturally Speaking, please do come back and let me know how you get on. (I have no association with the program or company and get no benefit from this review.)