Archive for September, 2007

You might like to come along to a discussion panel at the City Womens Network (CWN) on “Social Media: Online Communities” on 18 October ( 18.30 - 20.30pm). I’m one of the speakers along with a number of other web, digital marketing and business PR experts.

Here’s the blurb:

Using social media to build an online community around your business can be an effective way to retain clients, bring in new ones and raise the profile of your enterprise. In this panel discussion, we explore practical steps you can take to create and manage an online community relevant for your business.
We are proud to have selected a panel of speakers:

Yang-May Ooi, founder of social media consultancy ZenGuide and experienced blogger, will talk about strategies to keep your visitors coming back to your site and to develop your brand’s presence online.

Giles Colborne, President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association and Managing Director of cxpartners, will guide you through the roles and responsibilities in managing online communities.

Kristen Berg, marketing strategist, looks at some examples of how brands have used communities, the strategic role they play and the potential value to the company.

Silvia Cambié, Director of Chanda Communications and Chair of CWN’s Membership Committee, will be moderating the session.

Organised by the Membership Committee. For more information, contact the organiser, Silvia Cambié, on silvia[at]chandacom.com.

Venue information:
Hosted by CO3 Limited
First Floor, Downstream Building No. 1, London Bridge,
SE1 9BG London, GB
nearest tube is London Bridge.

Time: 18.30pm
Date: 18 October 2007

Members: £20
Non-members: £25 (men welcome as guests)

It would be great to see you there. If you’re coming, email me and I’ll let the organisers know.

Last week, I attended a City Womens Network drinks reception hosted by haute couture fashion designer Roubi L’ Roubi in his studio in the City. I chatted to Roubi about the presentation I had just given at the Copyright Licensing Agency earlier that afternoon.

In contrast to the social media approach to content - where bloggers freely use photos from other websites and video-makers create mash-up movies from other people’s footage - the traditional approach to content is to protect it from being used by others without financial payment.

The main theme of my presentation to the rights-holders was that there are other currencies and values to be gained from taking a more free and easy approach to your content - kudos and community, fun and creativity can be used by content creators to disseminate their work and their reputation more widely than the old protectionist approach and in this way, create a more valuable brand and a larger market for their product.

Roubi, who creates amazing ceramics and large canvas paintings as well as beautiful fashion designs, nodded enthusiastically. “It’s much better to share and be open with your work than to hide it all away!” he said. In the fashion business, designers look at designs created by others for inspiration and develop and build on those designs to make something entirely new - but there are also those who copy an idea out-and-out. Roubi’s take on this is: “If someone copies you, it’s an inspiration for you to get new ideas, keep moving ahead, keep innovating. That’s business. You have to be a leader and keep creating and being the best. You can’t stand still in business. Creatively, it’s a good way to be challenged to come up with new ideas.”

This entrepreneurial take from a successful creative designer was striking for its contrast to the worries and concerns expressed at the copyright meeting earlier that day. As a novelist, I completely understood those concerns from the afternoon discussions and yet, as someone involved in a creative online business, I also immediately connected with what Roubi was saying. Looking at the social media, marketing and communication businesses out there online, it’s easy to see that the millenial approach of openness and sharing is very much to the fore. Here on the ZenGuide blog, I offer advice and tips and share my views for free in the same spirit.

Roubi told the story of a jewellery designer who had created an innovative design for a delicate and exquisite necklace. The necklace was sold only through one retail outlet in London. The designer had not sold many over the years but had not wanted to make it available in more outlets because she was afraid it might be copied. It didn’t make any business sense, Roubie commented. His story reminded me of the self-defeating approach of the Bertolt Brecht estate I mentioned earlier this week.

I want to leave the last word to Roubi, who emailed me some additional thoughts on succeeding in life and in business:

“My two rules of thumb:

- open your little black book and share with others.

- be transparent with work and open to others.

They serve me well and make me enjoy attracting people with same attitude to life.”

ymcla

I will shortly be switching email notification providers from Feedburner to Feedblitz. The advantage of this is that, instead of receiving an email every few days, you will receive a weekly email digest of the latest posts on ZenGuide. This will minimise the number of emails coming into your Inbox while keeping you regularly updated with news and top tips on social media issues.

You don’t have to do anything to continue receiving weekly updates from ZenGuide. You will get an email from me soon saying “ZenGuide is changing newsletter delivery services” - this will have some helpful information about the new service. After that, the new service will deliver the weekly email to you every Thursday.

If you have any queries at all, please get in touch with me via the Contact link.

Last week, I gave a presentation at the Copyright Licensing Agency’s annual open meeting about The Impact of Web 2.0 on copyright issues. It was a packed hall with over 180 people, many of them standing. The delegates ranged from authors and content producers to publishers and librarians and knowledge management professionals in education and business organisations. Althought I couldn’t make it for the whole of the round table discussion on digital information and copyright chaired by Chris Bryant, MP, I managed to catch the tail end of it. I also had the chance after the event to speak to a few of the delegates, including representatives from the BBC, a photographic rights agency, a publisher and a corporate knowledge management professional.

I’m jotting down here some of my impressions of the issues from the conference - these are no more than impressions and vignettes of the discussions as they were aired and raise more questions for debate rather than giving firm answers.

• The government is making funding available for schools to help students become more internet- and social media- literate but there are apparently delays due to concerns about schools using materials off the internet in breach of copyright. However, there are apparently special sites offering copyright-free material for schools and educational establishment for just this purpose. But, overall, can the government with all its unwieldy bureaucratic machinery be the right instrument for change is the fast moving area of online technology and networked communication and enterprise?

• Is digital rights management here to stay? Or will content producers like the BBC have to accept the fact that they will have to let go off their rights to a product some time after it’s been produced?

• At the moment, the likes of the BBC can still find a market to sell its high quality products like its natural world series etc due to the fact that pirated versions on the internet are of low quality. It is probably not long before the technology will be freely available to upload high quality pirated versions online. What then for the original content producers?

• Is there a future for book writers when digital readers become more widely available? At the moment, book lovers are still attached to the physical book but as the young techno-loving iPod wearing millenials and their children start to outnumber us oldies, will they adapt more enthusiastically to electronic book readers? If so, will that be an opportunity for “bijou” writers who don’t produce blockbusters to gain a wider readership through digital distribution because they won’t be at the mercy of the bookshops for distribution? Or will it be a threat because their work can now be easily copied and freely distributed illegally?

• Chris Bryant mentioned the estate of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. The estate were apparently restrictive for a long time in granting rights for Brecht’s works to be used, quoted, performed or edited. For example, his plays in their original would run for over 3.5 hours which is difficult to market to today’s theatre-going audiences. However, they have recently been more open in rights granting and the result has been that more Brecht plays are being performed and the increased exposure generally from the dissemination of his works through freer rights has resulted in greater revenue returns for the estate.

• The panellists in the main discussion all called for flexibility in managing copyright - yes, it is important to protect and value the products of creativity and hard work but in this digital age, it’s important to be flexible to enable the sharing of information and knowledge.

• I was struck by the comment of a university representative about the difficulties of printing off 50 copies of an online article to include in a student pack for discussion on one of the university’s courses. It’s ironic in that the founding principle of the World Wide Web was that the technology was meant to make information freely available for all…

What do you think? Have you had experiences around copyright issues and social media or online digital technologies? I’d love to hear your views - please add a comment or email me.

Photo: of Sony Digital Reader thanks to askdavetaylor.com

ymcla

Today, I’m going along to the Copyright Licensing Agency to give a presentation at their open meeting on the impact of digital media and Web 2.0 for copyright stakeholders. It was somewhat last minute as their original speaker for the Web 2.0 segment, Giles Colbourne, a web usality expert at cxpartners, was unable to attend due to a conflicting engagement in the US. Giles asked me to step in last week so I spent most of this last weekend, putting together the presentation and slides.

While thinking about the issues to bring together for this talk, I found myself having a vested interest in both sides of the rights-holding debate.

As a a writer in print media, with two novels published, a third book (non-fiction) in the works and articles published in magazines to my name, I am fully in favour of my creative rights being protected by legislation. The reason is primarily to do with the monetary currency that I receive in return for my work from the bodies who publish my writing. As a professional writer, I expect to be remunerated for the work I create.

As a blogger and free-wheeling consumer of social media on the internet, I’ve got used to the idea that stuff from the web should be free - other than real-world-type things that you have to buy like CDS, books, groceries online or software of a certain level of high complexity that is worth paying money for. People create videos on Youtube and give you an embed code so you can embed (publish) it on your own site. Musicians create podsafe music for the joy of distributing their music to millions online even though they may not be able to get a record deal. I spend as much time - if not more - writing on my blog for free, compared to how much time I spent writing my novels, for which I was paid. Others offer their photos under the Creative Commons Licence so we can enjoy their creative work for free. The idea of having to pay for social media stuff in order to remunerate their creators feels like anathema.

This makes me feel strangely schizophrenic.

But I think the answer to breaking through the apparent conflict is in how we value the content we create in different media.

In my post last week on the world’s first website, I discussed the founding principle behind the world wide web and social media - the principle that information should be freely available to anyone. This is seemingly at odds with the traditional view that information and intellectual property has value and if you want it you need to pay for it.

In the traditional model, the value lies in scarcity and protection. In the new social media model, value lies in abundance and in sharing.

What I’ll be exploring in my talk to the CLA is what value the web’s open source principle has to offer to us offline content creators and publishers - and how we might look to take advantage of it, which I hope will be an interesting and useful approach for the writers, publishers and rights agents who will be attending.

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For delegates attending the CLA open meeting, you can download my presentation slides on The Impact of Web 2.0 - I will be making the password available at the meeting.

ymcla

The world wide web. Social networks. Links. Making connections. Creating communities. The internet.

All these words and phrases evoke images of a spider’s web, a network of connections, chains, groups of people, fishing nets - so many things that bind us all together.

One of the powerful currencies of social media is links - because links help you move up the searchability ranks and also up the rank of authority. It comes from the early origins of the internet which began in the world of academia. Academic texts that are referred to by other academic writers gain the reputation of being authorities on that particular subject. The more a particular text is cited, the greater the authority. So, for example, in the world of psychology, textbooks invariably cite Freud - but they are not so likely to cite an unknown student’s dissertation. Freud is an authority - and is likely to stay one - while that unknown student is not unless he/ she gets their dissertation noticed and cited by other academics. And cited a lot.

So with blogs and websites and other online content: the more other sites link to your blog, the greater your blog is considered an authority. Technorati is a website that calculates your blog’s ranking in the world of blogs so you can see how you compare with the top blogs like Endgadget (No. 1) and Boing Boing (No. 2) - they are the blogs that are linked to the most.

There’s a delightful application called TouchGraph that helps you visualise the network of communities and connections that you are in. Here is a screen shot of the connectivity for my arts and writing blog, Fusion View (No. 69,776* on Technorati).

(Click on the picture for a more detailed view)

To check out how connected you are, go to TouchGraph and type in your blog’s URL and it will generate a swirling, moving net of all the other blogs and websites you are linked with. It’s wonderfully hypnotic, reminding me of the adage that no-one is more than six people away from anyone else (”the six degrees of separation”).

And if you haven’t already done so, sign up at Technorati and “claim your blog”.

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*It seems that breaking through the top 100,000 Technorati ranking barrier is a big deal on the blogosphere, as testified by some of the blog posts that celebrate that breakthrough. So, I guess I need to do something like throw my mouse in the air and douse my computer with champagne or something…!

The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) is organising a regional conference for its European and Middle Eastern communicators with La Salle University in Barcelona on 4th and 5th February 2008. The theme is Innovation through Communication.

I recently joined IABC and I’m delighted to be part of the organising board for the EuroComm conference in Barcelona with the responsibility of implementing and running the conference blog. The website and blog are being developed by La Salle’s inhouse team and I spoke with their key conference organiser Alejandro Beya and web developer Carlos Ramil last week about infrastructure and design elements. They’ll be using Wordpress and I’m very excited to see what they are going to create.

The website and blog will be launching during October. I am pulling together our core blogging team and we are also inviting guest bloggers to contribute posts around the themes of innovation and communication. For example, we have invited the speakers to blog about the topics that they will be speaking on at the conference - from a more personal point of view than they might perhaps be able to offer in a conference room with scores of people, powerpoint slides and miked up to the sound system.

So far, the line-up of bloggers looks something like this:

Blogging Team/ Blog Management

Yang-May Ooi, communications & social media consultant, ZenGuide (UK)
Angie Macdonald, web writer & blog management specialist, ZenGuide (UK)
Marc Wright, internal communications expert, simply-communicate.com (UK)
Giles Colbourne, web usability expert, cxpartners (UK)
Kevin Keohane, brands expert, SAS (UK)

Guest Bloggers

Silvia Cambie, business communications expert, Chanda Communications and President, EuroComm Organising Board (UK)
Andrew Riley, assurance reporting and communications specialist, Harrison Riley and President, IABC UK (UK)
Ulrich Gartner, Vice-President of Communications Europe, AB Electrolux (Sweden)
Ian Anderson, Head of the Communication and Information Unit, European Commission (Belgium)
Martin Crocker, Marketing Communications Manager, Gemalto (France)
Rauf Hameed, Communication and Environment Manager, Tetra Pak Arabia (Saudi Arabia)
Ulrike Bleistein, Head of Pharma Informatics Communications, Hoffman La Roche (Switzerland)
Velin Velkov, President of IABC Europe and Middle East Region (Bulgaria)

We are still in the preparation stage so the list is likely to change and evolve. I’ll be blogging more about that and all the other news about the conference on the EuroComm Blog once that is up and running. For now, I just wanted to share this heads-up with you here while we’re waiting for the main site to go live.

Photo: thanks to danntara from flickr.com

When you first start out blogging for your business, it can be tempting to write press release style posts for your blog. You know the kind of thing: all perky and full of news about how well you’re doing and what new products you’ve got lined up for this season. It’s safe. It’s what you’re used to writing. And after all, blogging is part of your marketing strategy, isn’t it, so you should be marketing your business like mad on your blog - shouldn’t you?

Think of a business that you might have contact with in your own life. Your dry cleaner. Your local restaurant. Your accountant. Your car manufacturer. Would you go and read their blog regularly if all they talked about was how fab they were, what deals they had on, what new staff just joined them? Of course they’d say all that, you think to yourself: I get enough junk mail through the letter box and junk email in my Inbox without spending my internet surfing time voluntarily subjecting myself to more of the same.

I’m not saying that you should do the opposite and blog in a way that is damaging to your business and say how crap you are, what a rip-off your prices are or anything that might be your personal “Gerald Ratner Effect“. Remember Ratner? He infamously bankrupted his own jewellry business by declaring in a speech that their products were “crap”.

The thing is blogging is different from marketing. Blogging is about making a connection, engaging in a discussion, sharing stories, views and ideas. It’s about conversation and community. It’s about your readers. Your audience. Your customers and clients. Your friends and colleagues. It’s about what they are interested in and what engages them. What piques their curiosity. What fires them up. What keeps them coming back to your blog. And to you.

So, what would make you read a blog by, say, your dry cleaning company? Off the top of my head, for me, I’d like to learn about: what it’s like running a small business in my local high street; what the heck is “dry” cleaning anyway and how is it different from washing; if it’s a Mr and Mrs business, I’d like to get to know them as people a bit; what’s going on in my high street that they are best placed to share with me. I’m sure you could think of some more ideas.

Yes, of course, blogging is ultimately about you and your business. It’s just that it is not ALL about you. So, there is a time and place to include the newsy type stuff about your latest products and your successes - you can fit them in alongside all the other things you can talk about with your readers.

So, take a step back and think about who you want to be reading your blog.

Then think about what they might be interested in. How your blog might be of service to them. How it might entertain and amuse, provoke, engage, inform.

Now, get blogging.

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If you run a dry cleaning business and have a blog - - or you know someone who does - I’d love to hear from you! Or if you have - or someone you know has - a business blog that reaches out in a fresh way to your community of readers and customers, let me know. It would be great to feature your blog on ZenGuide.

Here’s my friend Melanie Crowe’s blog - Therapeutic Massage . She’s a massage therapist but she blogs about health, how to de-stress and work/ life balance as well as massage. She offers tips on healthy eating and tells you how to be a good client (to get the best of your massage session). Yes, she writes about the courses she goes on to improve her skills but that’s just part of the holistic message of her blog - that massage is part of a healthy and balanced lifestyle.

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

I’ve been researching the history of the internet and the world wide web as part of an introductory chapter on the relevance of the cyberworld to international public relations and communication. These days, we use the internet everyday to browse websites and communicate with each other that it is almost unremarkable. So, it’s been almost Zen-like to stop a moment and contemplate the amazing revolution that quietly took place in the 1980s and 1990s through the work of scientists and researchers who were then unknown to the wider world, building applications for their own use.

It all begins with defence and the military back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War. The Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and the space race began. America saw the need for a nationwide network of communications as part of gaining the technological advantage. Over the next twenty years, computer-based communications networks were developed across university faculties and research facilities, connecting first universities in America and then including those in Europe.

Larry G. Roberts, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf and Radia Perlman are some of the scientists who developed the networks, protocols and algorithms on which development of the internet was founded. They paved the way for the interconnected infrastructure of computers and cables that we now refer to as the internet.

It was only in 1990 that the first website appeared, building on all the technology and research that had gone before. Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau, scientists working at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), developed hypertext in 1989, the links system that allows us to click on text on a webpage and be immediately taken to another webpage - and that we all now take for granted .

Tim Berners Lee is also credited with inventing the HTML mark-up language and the HTTP protocol that are the building blocks of dynamic webpages. At their very simplest:

HTML is the code that gives the instructions for the creation of a page eg. for the layout and functions. For example, to make text bold, you preface it with an instruction in brackets “< bold >” and end it with “< / bold>“. To make a link, you preface the link with “< a href= [insert the site you want to link to]>” and then close it off again with “.

The HTTP protocol gives us the address of the webpage - take a look at the address of this and any webpage and you will see it begins with “http://”.

Taking hypertext, HTML and HTTP together, the world’s first website was put up in 1991 and you can still see it today at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
.

It explains what the WorldWideWeb is - initially the phrase was conceived without spaces and referred to as W3 for short - and in a bold statement set out the founding ethics of the web: “The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone”. That core statement still resonates today in many of the debates about how websites, social media, information and creative products are used, shared and accessed online - all of which I will be exploring in more depth later as part of the book.

For now, let’s think back to 1991 and what we were doing back and how we were working while Berners-Lee and Cailliau were creating what seemed to be some fairly unremarkable few pages of text. I remember writing short stories on my Amstrad at home and watching as they installed computers running DOS at work so that the secretaries could learn how to word-process using WordPerfect. For communications, we relied on telephones, post and couriers. Faxes were fairly new-fangled and my friends laughed at me when I bought a fax for personal use. They also shied away from leaving voice messages when I bought an answer-machine with one large sized cassette tape for my outgoing message and another for incoming messages. Businesses sent out print brochures and hard copy mail or bought advertising space on print or broadcast media or billboards.

Within 10 years all our lives would be changed forever.

Photo: of Tim Berners-Lee thanks to hwsw.hu

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This post is part of my research project for the book New Trends in International Public Relations that I am co-authoring with business communications expert, Silvia Cambie. I am focusing on the social media aspects while she is working on the wider public relations issues.

You can find all my posts relating to this book project by clicking on the link in the sidebar New Trends in International PR under ZenGuide Projects.

If you have any comments or thoughts on any of the issues I’ve discussed in my posts, please do add a comment or email me. In particular, if you have any additional information or expertise that could add to the book, I would love to hear from you. Also, if you think that there are errors or inaccuracies in what I’ve said, I’d like to learn from you. I’ll credit you, of course, if your contribution is used directly in the book - you can check out my ongoing list of acknowledgements online. Please note that all contributions in respect of the book are subject to the terms set out in contributors release notice.