Archive for the 'Announcements' Category

We got a text message this weekend from our fellow volunteer Ingrid Beazley who was at the international musuem conference in Denver, Colorado, USA to tell us that our volunteer blog Dulwich OnView has won the Best Small Museum Site 2010 at the Conference Archimuse International Best of the Web Awards this year. We are all thrilled that our hard work and collaborative effort over the last few years has been recognised on the international heritage sector stage. Thanks to everyone who voted for us at the conference site. Thanks also goes to our co-editors, contributors and readers!

The Best Small Musuem Site award is given “to explicitly recognise work from smaller institutions. [ie] These sites [which] have been:

• Created in-house or with volunteer effort
• Mounted by small institutions (with 5 for fewer professional staff)
• Created with very limited budgets (sometimes no budget)”

Congratulations also to the other winners in the other categories!

You can read a case study analysis of Dulwich OnView in an unpublished extract from my book International Communications Strategy (co-authored with Silvia Cambie) via the online pdf below:

Photo: of the Dulwich OnView editorial team and regular contributors, from Dulwich OnView

As you may know, I’ve been involved in a social media project for the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery on a voluntary basis - a community blog called Dulwich OnView. We started it just over two years ago and it’s been going from strength to strength, gaining quite a lot of attention within the heritage/ musuem sector here in the UK and internationally.

The exciting news is that the blog has been nominated for the Conference Archimuse International Best of the Web Award 2010. The annual conference is one of the biggest international conferences in the heritage/ museum sector and is taking place this year in Denver, USA. One of our bloggers team, Ingrid Beazley, is off there this week to give a presentation about Dulwich OnView alongside a number of academics who have written research papers on the strategy and structure of the blog.

The success of Dulwich OnView (DOV) is due to all the individual volunteers who have contributed their diverse skills as well as their time to the project so I want to set out for the record acknowledgements to the core team who have, to date, made the blog an eclectic and lively online community:

Founder Members and Editorial Team

INGRID BEAZLEY - In her capacity as chair of the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery she facilitated Yang-May’s concept, ’selling’ it to the Gallery staff and Friends committee. Now as one of Dulwich OnView’s acting editors, she commissions articles from the Gallery staff and from the local community and promotes the website ceaslessly, locally as well as internationally.

ANGIE MACDONALD - took over from Catherine Fraher as acting editor in the early months of Dulwich OnView and shaped the role of the Acting Editor. She wrote the Editor’s Handbook, trained other team members to be editors and to use Wordpress blogging software. She also writes occasionally for DOV. More recently she has been involved in project managing the redesign of DOV, co-ordinating the team ideas and working closely with Ingrid and the web designer to create a new-look DOV.

YANG-MAY OOI - created the concept of Dulwich OnView as a community blog and developed the key “guerrilla marketing” strategy for the blog to raise Dulwich Picture Gallery’s profile among the online demographic. She also planned the DOV team structure and set up the web-based collaborative systems which make this project self-managing and non-hierarchical. This includes creating the collaborative editorial documents which ensure that the blog runs smoothly and writing the several handbooks which set out all the processes for current and new members of the team. She continues to provide strategic advice as well as contributing multimedia content to the blog.

ANNA SAYBURN - wrote many of the earliest DOV articles, helping to develop the informal, community style of Dulwich OnView through a mixture of interviews with local people, reviews of local events and pieces about local history and art associated with Dulwich. She served as an acting editor for part of the first two years, helping bring in new contributors and fostering the sense of community. She still writes regularly for DOV.

STEVE SLACK - writes off the wall articles for DOV with the aim of debunking the myth that Dulwich is populated solely by rich, posh people. He’s written about pub quizzes, street names, local history and general peculiar cultural goings-on. Working with DOV has helped him develop as an online writer and given him skills he uses in other freelance work.

TAHRA MORTON - is an intern at DOV, writing articles as well as carrying out her role as one of the acting editors while on a work secondment in Brussels, Belgium, underlining that DOV is truly an online community that while local is also without borders.

SALLY ANN JOHNSON - advised the team on risk management and helped develop DOV’s article submissions policy. She also writes for the blog.

CATHERINE FRAHER - was DOV’s first acting editor. She co-ordinated the team of volunteers, editorial meetings and uploaded much of the early content onto the blog.

SHAPA BEGUM - an intern at DOV, she currently writes articles and is responsible for the Paul Nash online art competition. She is provided with regular support by the editorial team to learn and develop skills in networking, editorial management and technical skills.

ANNA MARIA DI BRINA - is one of DOV’s acting editors and also writes articles on art and events.

ANGELA CORRIAS - contributed to the editorial style of DOV as one of the acting editors and collaborated in its content with interviews to local artists and coverage of local events.

Other Contributors

Amanda Greatorex, Greville Havenhand, Laverne Hunt, Ed Saunders, Rebecca Portsmouth, Erica Green, Steve Overbury, Nigel Thorpe, Lorenzo Ali, Daniel Pateman, Patrick Knight, Bella Tullo, “Jane Morris”

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Related info:

Dulwich OnView
Patrons of Dulwich Picture Gallery
Blogging for the Heritage Sector
Dulwich OnView leads the way for heritage sector blogging
Our pro-bono project, Dulwich OnView, makes impact in heritage sector
Dulwich OnView Wikipedia entry

The British Malaysian Society put on a great event the other evening at Jom Makan, just off Trafalgar Square, for the talk that I gave with my co-author Silvia Cambie on using social media for business. There was a good crowd there - a mix of Malaysians and British folk ranging from representatives from the Malaysian High Commission, Malaysian students and British and Malaysian business owners and solo professionals. Silvia spoke about the use of social media by global business, giving examples from multinational companies and also international associations. Changing gear, I focused on small business and solo professionals who use blogging and social networks, throwing in a mix of Malaysian and British case studies.

Here are some pics from the evening:

There were some interesting questions and also a good discussion after our formal presentation. To give you a flavour of the issues of interest, here are my notes on two of the questions that people wanted to discuss further:

How useful is Twitter for business use?

In Silvia’s response to this question, she gave some examples of how Twitter can be used to encourage delegates at a conference to participate in the discussions through Twitter - she is implementing this strategy for one of her clients, the European Commission, at an event coming up soon. The Twitter comments and conversations can be collected through tactical use of hashtags (a way of attributing a common keyword to a Twitter conversation eg including “#leweb” in your “tweet” to reference the Le Web conference will enable it to be collated via a search of that hashtag) after the event and analysed/ reviewed by European Commission ministers.

For small businesses or individuals, I suggested that Twitter is also a good way in every day usage to make an initial contact with people who may be tweeting on topics you are interested in and this contact can then be followed up by email, for example. It’s a good way as well to ask questions and invite opinions, especially if you are researching an issue eg for an article or a book. You can also raise your profile and expertise if you tweet about your speaking engagements and projects you may be working on as well as engaging in discussions on topics of relevance for your industry.

Can you make money using social media?

Silvia highlighted that sales of virtual items on the Chinese social network QQ brought in revenue for the owners of that network. There are ways to monetize social media through such innovations but it is a matter of identifying the right market and products that can be sold in this way.

I offered the counter view that the value of social media is not necessarily in direct sales but rather in creating networking opportunities. It falls in the ball park of sending out mail shots and newsletter or taking clients out to lunch or coming along to networking events such as that night’s events where you might learn something useful for your business and also meet some interesting contacts. There may not be direct monetary value but the value comes through making contacts and building relationships with them.

Thanks …..

And as a last word, Silvia and I would like to thank Haliza, Louise and Zehan as well as the other committee members of the BMS for inviting us and for organising such a pleasant evening!

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

My co-author Silvia Cambie and I are very excited that our big day has arrived. The launch of our book International Communications Strategy is taking place tonight, hosted by Chicago Booth University and The International Alliance for Women.

Due to restrictions on numbers, this is an invitation only event but Mark Smith, CEO at Ipadio.com, is kindly running a live phoneblog from the event where he will hopefully be able to live stream some of the speeches and also interview some of our guests during the party so that those who have not been able to come along will be able to get a flavour of the event through the audio feed.

I’ll also be calling in at various times during today to let you know how the preparations are going.

You can listen to the audio blog via the player below. When the tab “Live: On Air” shows up, you will be able to listen to the live audio feed (subject to a 5 second delay). Otherwise, you can listen to already-recorded audio sessions by clicking on the Previous tab (and move about the various sessions by clicking Next and Latest as required).

The event starts at 6.30pm UK time (GMT +1hour). The live audio feed will be running intermittently whenever Mark calls in on his mobile phone.

I hope you enjoy the audio version of the event.

I’ll be phoning in after the event, too, to share my impressions and de-brief of the event so do come back in the next few days as well!

Business communications expert and podcasting guru, Neville Hobson, interviewed my co-author Silvia Cambie and me on Friday for his influential For Immediate Release podcast. We talked about how we came to write our book, International Communications Strategy, the main themes and ideas we explore in it and our favourite chapters/ case studies.

Neville has now uploaded the podcast interview on iTunes and his blog - so if you’d like to listen to our discussion, please do go and check it out.

Thanks, Neville!

Photo: thanks to Neville, with permisision

I think the writers and book readers amongst you could find this behind-the-scenes process interesting in terms of seeing how the publishing world works and also, understanding the importance of a book title, whether in the fiction or non-fiction sector.

When I was writing my first novel, The Flame Tree, that was the working title I used and when I submitted it to Hodder & Stoughton, that was the title they went with. The flame tree is the central symbol of that novel and it also evokes the Asian setting of the book.

With my second novel, my working title was Mindgame but Hodder were not initially keen on it. I remember sitting down for days coming up with a list of over 30 different alternative titles in response to their feedback. In the end, they looked at my list of 30 something titles and came back to say that Mindgame was the best of the lot!

For the last year, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I have been using the working title New Trends in International Communications/ PR for the business book on cross-cultural communications that we’ve been writing. The title seemed to us to sum up what the book was about and whenever we talked about it to friends and people we met, they would nod in recognition and understanding so we wouldn’t have to go into a long-winded explanation.

Originally, our publisher Kogan Page were keen to ensure that the title included the words “Public Relations” but Silvia, an experienced business communicator, always preferred the word “Communications”. She explains that in the world of business communications, marketing and PR, “communications” is the wider expertise, of which marketing and PR are subsets and that a title that encompasses that wider context would have a wider audience. From my point of view, coming from the world of social media, I also prefer “communications” as, unfortunately, “PR” has a bad name in the online landscape, being associated with spin and hype without authenticity in the minds of bloggers.

So when we submitted the manuscript to our publisher Kogan Page, it was time to discuss the final title of the book in some detail. After some discussion about the issues around “communications” and “PR” with her marketing and editorial team, our editor came back agreeing with the choice of “communications.”

There was another issue, however, she told us. The problem was with “new trends.” The book is going to be published in July this year and the aim is to keep it in print with good sales over the foreseeable future. What is “new” now is not going to be new in a few years time. Similarly, what are “trends” now are likely to have become mainstream in time. But what we are writing about - the case studies, the concepts etc - which are the meat of the book will remain relevant for businesses and communicators because they have practical and useful applications beyond newness and trendiness. So the publishing team felt that the phrase “new trends” did not fully or accurately capture the thrust of the book.

So what to do? We batted some ideas back and forth in a series of emails and finally, we all agreed on the final title: International Communications Strategy: Developments in cross-cultural communications, PR and social media. We introduced the word “strategy” to capture the aspects of the book where we discuss how businesses can take advantage of developments in technology and cultural sensitivities. From the publishers point of view, the word also emphasise that the book is aimed at high-level executives within businesses and communications professionals who will need to be thinking strategically in today’s globalised world.

For background to the project, read my post about our involvement in Dulwich OnView

Check out the blogs, newsletters and social media spaces created by the ZenGuide Network - ie friends, colleagues, clients and associates connected with the ZenGuide Communications and Social Media Consultancy: all in one place.