28

Feb

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-28

Posted by dyates  Published in 1

Powered by Twitter Tools

please comment

21

Feb

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-21

Posted by dyates  Published in 1
  • #6nations #
  • All due respect to Italy because I don't believe for a minute either England or Italy thought it would be 6-6 at half time #6nations #
  • #6nations England v Italy – kick it this way, kick it that way. This is dross. #
  • #6nations Hoo-bloody-ray! Try to England, not sure it is particularly deserved. Certainly singing 'Swing Lo Sweet Chariots' is premature #
  • RT @JohnAByrne: Superb profile of guitarist Jeff Beck in today's NY Times. http://nyti.ms/dhDYj7 #
  • http://bit.ly/dujjxH BMP Scraps Whites Only policy (via @guardian) – I hope multiracial groups now join BNP en-masse and alter the manifesto #
  • Dug a veg patch out for the kids this weekend. Cait said she wanted to grow Strawberries. Elliot said he would like to grow sausages. #
  • #buzz is just clutter in my life. I cannot search, organise or connect by subject, It won't collapse it is just ungainly clutter in my life. #
  • Caitlin and Elliot on half-term. Daddy left in charge. Caitlin has been giving Daddy a make-over! http://tweetphoto.com/11751611 #
  • The Daily Mash – VIEIRA MISTOOK WHELAN FOR NAZI SOLDIER http://bit.ly/ – V. funny, if you follow football, especially if you saw the match #
  • Save Abbey Road Studios, 'The home of The Beatles' from being destroyed. Online Petition: http://bit.ly/9451tD – Please RT #
  • #abbeyroad #
  • new on http://daveyates.co.uk : What's the #BUZZ about Google Buzz? Oh look, the Emperor has got no clothes on http://bit.ly/aVbbVY #
  • New on http://noisejoy.com: Political poster piss-taking. The electorate should fight back – somewhat like this… http://bit.ly/dh2P3U #
  • RT @daveyates: #labour #conservative – poster piss-taking. The electorate fight back… http://bit.ly/dh2P3U #
  • New on http://noisejoy.com: Gordon Brown's school report – bullying, bad language, foul temper #labour #generalelection http://bit.ly/9uAAxD #

Powered by Twitter Tools

please comment

14

Feb

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-14

Posted by dyates  Published in 1
  • new on http://daveyates.co.uk : Personal Branding – Coming up with a personal business card http://bit.ly/crEypS #
  • I'm experimenting with Personal Branding – Part 1: Coming up with a personal business card http://bit.ly/crEypS #
  • One way or another I haven't stepped foot outside all w/end – Got quite a lot of work / chores done. But I am utterly disgusted with myself #
  • Ken Clarke is on my LinkedIn page. "Did I use Enterprise Allowance in the 80's? Ken surely you recall, you & Thatcher put us all out of work #
  • new on http://daveyates.co.uk : iPhone …or perhaps I don't any more http://bit.ly/dmhZ7o #
  • UK elections. But who to vote for? All these bastards have given us is moral & financial bankruptcy. It's asking to get robbed and raped #
  • And after watching Stoke play well (eventually) v. Wigan on @Flash_Sports, Shameless starts immediately afterwards. Perfect evening in #
  • Good marketing: via @BrentHodgson: Doctor sends out monthly e-Newsletter with a voucher to a local restaurant that serves healthy food #
  • new on http://daveyates.co.uk : Dictionary of Online Abbreviations http://bit.ly/9vPYMb #
  • @sooziesoo Not me, I don't. I prefer helevetica ultra light in reply to sooziesoo #
  • My company is concerned. Found out I went for an interview. They probably don't recall saying repeatedly that the web dept may be closing. #
  • @sooziesoo There's many a true word painted in jest in reply to sooziesoo #
  • Collecting online abbreviations. Favourite so far is the IT tech's acronym 'PICNIC' – problem in chair not in computer http://bit.ly/b8u1pt #
  • RT @mashable 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence http://bit.ly/cSbGAk #
  • So, if I have this right, I Tweet here and it appears in Google #Buzz there. #
  • Learning lots about digital footprints & what a mess ones digital feet make if spotted treading while you thought you were tip-toeing #
  • @JohnCleese Why has Google Buzz styled their interface on you? in reply to JohnCleese #
  • RT @BobDylanSays: There's nothing to prove #
  • RT @BobDylanSays: Ev'rything's still the same #
  • A lonely hearts ad from 1695, basically says, 'Man seeks woman, must have £250,000' http://bit.ly/9SlYjY #
  • Dara O' Briain on Winter Olympics: '40 kinds of sliding! …entire global sporting festival based on absence of friction! http://bit.ly/cDDzTY #
  • @stokecity Capello may come away from Eastlands deciding that Danny Higginbotham is the man for the job :) http://bit.ly/97CwWF in reply to stokecity #
  • Today is a TV day: 6 Nations Rugby and FA Cup footie all day, including Stoke v Man City. This is no time to be a new man – get the beers in #
  • RT @mashable HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz into Your Gmail http://bit.ly/9rDjfe #

Powered by Twitter Tools

please comment

7

Feb

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07

Posted by dyates  Published in 1
  • Transfer deadline day: Hoping for 4: Bergovic, Collison, Heskey and Pennant – if lucky maybe Scott Parker and Kenwynne Jones #stokecity #
  • Too much weather, far too much of it and all of it is wet #
  • @threethirty Re: Linux – IT'S NOT ME http://bit.ly/1rjAwu I don’t know lottalinuxlinks daveyates username but I wish he’d get one #linux #in in reply to threethirty #
  • RT @Memopal: free backup space – 3,5GB instead of 3! http://bit.ly/cgU46d – I have 300Gb Memopal account instead of a file server. It's good #
  • Personal projects today. Big meeting at 4pm – Can I do 70miles to see ailing parents, stay 2 hours, back, wash, psyche up, go to meeting? #
  • new on http://daveyates.co.uk : Apple iPad – Guess the review – What can we learn from history? http://bit.ly/aQEVoX #
  • new on http://daveyates.co.uk : John Terry has been doing more than just Wayne Bridge's ex. http://bit.ly/cSrhKN #
  • RT @socialmedia2day Social Media Today | There Is No ROI From Social Media! http://tinyurl.com/yc48yl2 Hmmm Depends on the investment really #
  • Bad flu. Last time, 2 yrs ago, Carolyn diagnosed Man Flu. Turned out to be Pneumonia. Let's see if she dares to call it MF this time #
  • Time to change Twitter avatar. Too many avatars are worthy/silly graphics and pics of anonymous people. Typography. That's the answer #
  • Child 1 happy. Child 2 wrecks child 1's painting. Child 1 now unhappy. Child 2 also unhappy after scolding. Noise makes parents 1&2 unhappy #
  • RT @iaindale: Blogpost: Well, I'm Convinced! http://tinyurl.com/yfxxrl9 MPJim Devine's expense waffle. Who voted for for this 'Member'. #
  • Have you ever discovered that someone is trying to crap on you? I could screw them over, confront them or ignore them. What shall I do? #
  • new on http://daveyates.co.uk : Dean Whitehead Superman http://daveyates.co.uk/personal/stoke-city/dean-whitehead-superman.html #
  • England Rugby team should play in the vintage kit all the time. It looks better than all the stylised Nike shite and they are stuffing Wales #
  • @shawndm Wise words indeed. in reply to shawndm #
  • @Fivve http://bit.ly/cvXzUh iI think it's just a bit of funt's just a gag that went viraql on FB in reply to Fivve #
  • @Fivve Whoops. That was a bit of drunken typing – basically someone seeing how far they could get it to go on FB in reply to Fivve #
  • @Fivve Your Twitter avatar looks a little sun-burned. Are you sure it's RGB. You sometimes get this effect with CMYK images in reply to Fivve #
  • RT @spongeproject: RT @DirtyEnid: More cat owners 'have degrees' than dog-lovers. http://bit.ly/cv3PMI Complete waste of pixels #
  • Will do. I am at 2nd interview for a job in Chelt. If it comes off, I should be there 5 days a week #
  • If you use the iPhone app for Twitter you can set it to locate your position and give your location when tweeting. Was useful during the … #
  • use you can filter Twitter by location and get latest info locally #
  • Ooh err all my txt messages to @fivve are publishing to Twitter don't usually use that function #ifeellikeadick #
  • The Deer Hunter has just started. I'd forgotten how good this film really is. #
  • @iaindale But given x mths election run-in, they rarely clarify much. The 45 sec delivery could force them to crystalise something solid. in reply to iaindale #

Powered by Twitter Tools

please comment

4

Feb

‘The Social Media Question’ – PowerPoint Presentation for download

Posted by dyates  Published in Business Blogging, Interface Design, Marketing News, Marketing on the Web, SEO, Social Media, Wordpress

The Realitus Social Media Question presentation was created in conjunction with a test site (trialzone.co.uk) as a broad overview of the Social Media phenomenon and illustrates the way connectivity, user generated content and viral dynamics operate through social media. You are free to use it with the proviso that it must be credited on any reproduction of the content, verbally in presentation and as a printed credit otherwise.

Download Link (Warning this file is about 62 Mb)

NB: About Trialzone.co.uk

Trialzone.co.uk is a live presentation (and occasional test environment) which we have used as a live site during client presentations. The site itself is largely filled with placeholder content or RSS imported content and has been set up so as to not appear through search engines. In this way any imported content will be viewed as duplicate content anywhere on the web.

please comment

6

Sep

WordPress security

Posted by dyates  Published in WordPress Security

The WordPress community has been shaken out of it’s smug superiority with the news that it is being targetted by hackers. Pete Cashmore’s Mashable site has put the word out on the web. And WordPress has released the news itself through the WordPress users CMS screens with the rather helpful inclusion of an instant upgrade to sort it out.

But WordPress gets hacked all the time. The problem is that it is so popular. Anyone with a modicum of web knowledge can set up a WordPress site and after that, a good many of them forget about their sites. I thought I would take a look at this site and upgrade it today and guess wha,t it had been hacked. There were some hidden links to drug websites. I clicked the upgrade link and not much happened. I noticed that the site was trying to reference a site called jobmarketeconomist[dot]com. Weird. I looked at that site and sure enough it was about the job market.

Then I looked it up on Google and the site description showed it as having lots to do with pharmaceutical stuff. And sure enough, once I looked at the source code for their page there were over 4000 hidden links to web pages from the grubby end of the pharmaceutical market.

Now this isn’t the great master hack that everyone has been talking about – our database seemed unaffected, and the links in the site were working, but it has been a sobering lesson. I take care to secure and update this site regularly, but some piece of work somewhere has managed to get a piece of software to find the site, get into it and start invisibly using it to send links to nasty websites.

Fortunately, we are able to take it apart and sort things out. But if you are not able to do this, stick to the hosted version of WordPress. Otherwise, visit your own site from time to time and keep it upgraded.

please comment

22

Jun

The Benefits of Social Media

Posted by dyates  Published in Business Blogging, Interface Design, Marketing News, Marketing on the Web, Social Media, Wordpress

The benefits of running Social Media are initially ’soft’ benefits. Accumulated, these benefits build to reinforce you, your company and your ideas as good, strong and worth heeding. Benefits of social media would therefore include:

  • People purchase from a trusted source
  • If you ‘know’ an expert you take their advice. You trust their decisions and you act accordingly.
  • Free Advertising
  • Customers that evangelise your product.
  • Repeated and permanent mentions of your web site and product on the web
  • Free Gigantic Focus Groups
  • Discussing of the pros and cons of your products in
    Blogs
    Forums
    Microblogs
    OnLine Mainstream Press
    Review Sites
  • Detailed Customer Behavior Info:
    Conversion rates from specific campaigns
    Community response to specific campaigns
    Sites where conversations about your product occur
    Sites where traffic to your site originates
    Purchasing behavior in your store
    Products affiliates will group your products with
  • Relevant Ideas:
    New product ideas
    New campaign ideas
    Product improvement ideas
    Packaging ideas
    Partnership ideas
    Sales Channel ideas
    Ideas generation (the more people the more ideas)
  • Credibility:
    Recognition of company and staff as experts
    Recognition of company and staff as people (trustworthy)
  • Naturally Occurring and Unexpected Sales Channels:
    Sales can now flow from anywhere, based on the networks of your new evangelists. (e.g. one of your products is for e.g. a disabled person. One of your followers thinks it is really good. They may well be part of all the disabled groups and users on the social media networks. By leaving a good comment about you on your faceBook page, all their connections see it also. Suddenly you have lots of free exposure to exactly the right people voiced by exactly the right person)

Objective

More business
Targetted visitors
More market information
Better search engine placement against a range of search terms
Brand development online
Credibity of brand and personalisation of the organisation
Elevate Westland above competitors and ‘claim the online gradening space’
Establish Westland as ‘The’ online gardening people

The main benefit is in and around the brand. It establishes your company as the easiest and best resource for expertise. If you are first onlne and you get it right, it creates barriers to competitors. It sets a standard and owns the relationship as contacts are established and become direct marketing contacts.

please comment

22

Jun

DIY Social Media campaigns

Posted by dyates  Published in Wordpress

Notwithstanding all the idiosyncrasies of each individual organisation, it is possible to put together a basic template for a social media campaign.

Working on the notion of a client ‘Client X’:

DIY Social Media Campaign Template

  1. Create Client X accounts on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. These accounts act as a billboard in those communities and bring Client X interest back to the Client X site.
  2. Monitor all discussion forums, blogs, and other information sources on the web for mentions of Client X.
  3. Create community tools on their own web site to encourage discussion, lead generation, and product development support.
  4. Participate in every discussion about their product that happens on the web, even if only to thank people for discussing the product. Through this they personalise interactions between consumer and product.
  5. Automate the monitoring of the web for the popularity of their products and those of their rivals.
  6. Actively track performance measures of the sales of their products and their social media reach.
  7. Update their blog daily and participate in other blog discussions across the web.
  8. Be a person! Participate freely in conversations on the web that they are just interested in not necessarily about product or subject matter – unless specifically asked about it or it’s obviously relevant.
  9. Demonstrate competence through their blog. This means most posts are not directly about their products, but provide value beyond their products. One post may talk about a new product being released, followed by ten related tips.
  10. They build product reach using interactive tools like affiliate programs, business partner linking and some contests like “name the product” or “design a product” or “find the shop on a map.”
  11. They reward good behavior in their communities and on the web. They personally write to / acknowledge their biggest fans. They invite people who are knowledgeable to write in the Client X blog and participate in the site. They gracefully acknowledge expertise, enthusiasm, and participation.
  12. The application of social media systems involves the participation in the greater social web community. The directors and their staff need to be good ‘community members’ in order to reap the benefits of social media tools. (They have to honestly give to honestly get).

Tactical Social Media Campaigns

It can be effective to run social media campaigns alongside regular social media activity. These would be specific events designed to stand out and create a noticeable impression. These tend to rely upon viral dispersion but often get talked about by others online and in printed media as well.

There are references to many such campaigns online. I can case study our Australian partners Bendall’s involvement in the campaign with Australian PM Kevin Rudd

following the devastating bush fires in 2009 and others. Some are convoluted and others strike a chord with people out there. You might as well give it a go, it will attract attention and give your audience a flavour of the sort of people you are. Social Media is all about people.

Bringing It All Together

Social Media is a platform. You build things on it. In order to build an effective campaign it has to be coherent, participatory, maintainable and acceptable to the public. That’s tricky, but it has been established that successful campaigns aren’t just acceptable, they are valued by the public.

Social media is a social contract – you are inviting your public to work with you.

please comment

22

Jun

Social Media for Business

Posted by dyates  Published in Business Blogging, Marketing on the Web, SEO, Social Media, Wordpress

Social Media is problematic for business. Business websites are being circumvented in favour of information available through social media sites. Information given freely through a social network is likely to be trusted while there is a cynicism associated with corporate information. Social Media can make marketing control difficult: It is viral and bad news can travel fast; subject related traffic can create competition in search engines for keywords; more dynamic competitors can steal a march. However, the medium is established. It’s use is growing exponentially.

In 2008 Forester reported that:

Employers are finding the benefits of using social media: 63 percent are using social media to build and promote their brand, 61 percent are using it to improve communication and collaboration, and 58 percent are using it to increase consumer engagement;

75 percent of employees are already using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn for business purposes, up 15 percent from 2007;

Use of internal-facing communities is on the rise with 6 percent of organizations already reporting they deployed internal-facing communities, while 33 percent indicate their organization plans to implement internal-facing social media initiatives;

Similarly, external-facing communities are increasing: 27 percent of respondents said their companies were planning to deploy external-facing communities while only 13 percent indicated their organisations already have external-facing communities;

Online communities directed at specific interests and groups of people allow for more targeted marketing techniques and better results so for this reason 37 percent of organisations have specific areas of focus for their communities.

Business opportunities through Social Media

There are business opportunities through Social Media. Popular bloggers, like journalists and magazines, have their followers. They might be considered influencers from a commercial perspective and it is worth building a relationship with them. They are however not journalists or magazines and it is not necessarily wise to assume that cosying up to a popular blogger will do anything positive for your products or yoiur brand – the opposite can happen.

More certain is a social media strategy based upon engagement and participation. It is possible to extend the functionality of a WordPress website, publish content to it and have that information automatically appear across a range of social media sites such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. These posts should be complimented with dedicated activity on these media.

Openness and honesty are the watchwords of social media. Companies who have actively ecouraged their stasff to have social media accounts in the their company name and to use them come across as straight, honest companies airing their openness. Others will deliver through a social media persona operating for a company within the ‘social media sphere’. It might be a real person, it might be lots of information being fed through a single persona and it might be ghost written. Some of this does not sound completely truthful of honest, but it is a practical way around getting things written well, put in places where it will count and actually getting created at all after the first initial flush of activity has died down.

Typically (not exclusively) a busines social media campaign might involve :

  • Running a subject based blog
  • Entering subject related debates/forums/user-groups online
  • Seek to achieve positive ‘redistribution’ of the information
  • Posting tagged content on Flickr, YouTube, iTunes etc.
  • Creating Twitter, Facebook and other accounts
  • Linking all this together so that you can post the information in one place and it then distributes itself either automatically, or through others passing the word on.
  • Engaging in the ebb and flo of information online – even if it is not specifically about your subject. This is social media not corporate media

The general objective of a social media presence would be to:

  • Generate a following
  • Branding (as in promoting the correct perception of your company)
  • Have a direct relationship with a highly targetted audience
  • Establish a definitive position on the web
  • Build backlinks
  • Create a networked critical mass of activity and content
  • Become a trusted part of ‘the community’
  • Initiate viral distribution
  • Initiate a response
please comment

22

Jun

What is Social Media?

Posted by dyates  Published in Business Blogging, Marketing on the Web, SEO, Social Media, Wordpress

Social Media is a part of what has become known as Web 2.0. Web 1.0 would describe static websites where information flows one-way from website to reader and any dynamic functionality tends to be socially remote (forms, transactional etc.).

Web 2.0 broadly refers to a trend where the reader has turned publisher. Early examples were forums, still popular for Q&A research. An example of a Web 2.0 site would be Wikipedia. A reader can seek encyclopaedic information on a subject. Any reader can amend and add to the definitions on Wikipedia. The body of knowledge is created and maintained by readers not a central authority.

Social networking refers to self-published content and sites where content is contributed by many and read by many. They gravitate around social relationships or topics of common interest. There are platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, but the platform owners do not publish, they simply provide a place for others to publish and functionality to allow subscribers to share their content with others either openly or in defined groups.

Text, Images, Video and Audio

Since the web is easily able to accommodate media such as audio, images and video as well as text, social sites supporting these media have emerged. Well known sites would be Flickr, YouTube and iTunes. YouTube as an example allows you to create and post video, keep multiple videos in personal collections, tag with keywords and make the video available for rating and search by viewers both from within YouTube and through search engines.

Other social media activities have sprung up such as microblogging, primarily Twitter where users will publish small snippets of content. Content is published often frequently, either spuriously about mundane things or as a type of short-hand logging of information around subjects, conferences, projects and so on and as short cuts to more comprehensive articles on websites. Users follow and get followed by other users and in addition users will follow subject based posts and search for posts on a subject within the system.

Blogs

Perhaps most importantly, blogs have formed one of the foundation stones of social media. A blog is a ready-to-run website designed to take diarised content and index it by date and subject. Blogs can be centrally hosted or self-hosted. They are simple to use and platforms such as WordPress are ‘open source’ providing complete access to the code for the site, its underlying system and the way it operates. WordPress therefore allows a designer to turn a blog into a website yet retain all the linking potency of the original blog. Customisation, redesign and functionality extension is relatively simple for a designer. It means that anyone can have a website and easily create content. Part of the dynamic is the ability to link blogs to social media platforms and social media platforms to each other.

In addition a series of social media support functions have appeared. It has its own search and referencing sites, both as a central resource in the form of Technorati and also in the form of sites such as Digg and Delicious where readers inform these platforms about ‘good’ content. Links created on these sites are becoming trusted reference points and there is some suggestion that Google reflects this in its algorithms

please comment
Next Page »