Archive for the 'Social Media & Technology' Category

For all of you digital natives and visitors, one and all - Happy Holiday Season!

Thanks to Roger at Groucho on the Rye for first sharing this vid with me.

I’ll be taking a break away from the computer now to enjoy the winter festivities. See you in 2011!

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The contents of this blog, including this post, comments and links, are subject to this Disclaimer - please read it by clicking here

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You can read a case study analysis of Dulwich OnView in an unpublished extract from my book International Communications Strategy (co-authored with Silvia Cambie) via the online pdf below: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

For every person who loves Twitter and other forms of social media, there are those who don’t see the point of it. Why should I be interested in what some blogger or twitterer had for breakfast, those people would say. Who needs to know moment by moment what someone is up to?

Well, here’s one Twitterer that’s out of this world - literally - and whose updates might be worth getting moment by moment. Soichi Noguchi is an astronaut at the International Space Station and he is sending pics and videos to Twitter and Youtube of the view from outer space. You may not need to know what he had for breakfast but I’m rather glad that he’s sharing the view from his office…

The Youtube video above shows the flyover of Madagascar.

You can follow his Twitter stream at http://twitter.com/astro_Soichi and see his Twitpics at http://twitpic.com/photos/Astro_Soichi.

For my previous blog post on other astronauts who have been tweeting, see Tweet me to the Moon.

Photo: thanks to the NASA website

Over on Sharon Bakar’s blog recently, she bemoaned the fact that Malaysians still did not seem to be reading. This has been a long-time issue for Malaysians as far back as I can remember. Many of us are good at business, finance, engineering, IT etc but not so many of us are world-class writers. The local publishing industry is small and focuses mainly on business and self-improvement books rather than fiction or literature. The market just isn’t there.

There appeared to be a glimmer of hope in the last few years with the rise of litbloggers in Malaysia - people who love books and reading and who blog about their passion. Many are also published as well as aspiring writers. They gather regularly in Kuala Lumpur (KL) at book events and also in writing groups, some hosted by book-lover extraordinaire herself, Sharon Bakar. But for all their literary and intellectual abilities, this seems to be a small group who, while well-respected, are not generally treated to events of pomp and circumstance with corporate sponsorship and the recognition of celebrity status - eg. in the same way that in the UK, there’s the Booker Prize dinner which is covered in the press as well as on TV.

In contrast, I’ve noticed in the last year or so that bloggers have been getting the star treatment in Malaysia in a way that seems to overshadow the book writers. Last year saw the launch of the regional Nuffnang Blog Awards to honour the best bloggers in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia . It was a glitzy, black tie affair held at a fancy hotel, apparently modelling itself on the Oscars and was even covered by the Malaysian terrestial TV channel NTV7.

Kenny Sia, who won Best Entertainment Blog, leads the Blog-Rat Pack, with his personal blog rated as the no. 1 blog in Malaysia by the global blog ranking service Technorati. He has become a celebrity through his blog which then launched him into other high-profile roles eg he was invited to be a panellist on the Malaysian X Factor like web TV show, Malaysian Dream Girls, alongside other A list celebrities. He has been named as one of the “Top 20 under 40” influential people in Malaysia by print magazine KLUE.

Nuffnang continues to play the role of star maker with its Project Alpha web TV series, which is “the first Online TV Show unveiling the real faces behind Malaysia’s Top Bloggers”. According to the blurb, “The show will take audience into various sneak peeks of bloggers’ lives, who they are, how they live, what makes them tick and where they derive their inspiration to capture the attention and interests of millions of online readers on a daily basis. The show will also try to uncover their darkest secrets which they keep hidden from their readers.” Kenny was one of the stars in Season One and the measure of the show’s success is that Season Two is now underway.

So Malaysians may not be reading books but they certainly seem to be reading blogs. My take on the rise of celebrity bloggers there is that bloggers connect with Malaysians as Malaysians. There’s no attempt to polish their English or to write in a literary way - they just write in their own voices, as Malaysians, and that is what gives them a strong connection with their readers. Their fans identify with the bloggers - their sense of humour which is typically Malaysian, their interests, their daily lives. In contrast, novels as we know them today are really a Western art form, dominated by native English speakers from the UK and US, with prizes created in the West catering to a Western taste. The West defines what literature should be. So for Malaysian writers trying to break in to that field, it is bound to be much more challenging than for writers who are comfortable working within those defined parameters. Similarly, for Malaysian readers, it can be challenging to sit down for hours on end reading about stories and people that do not speak to you or even have you in mind as an audience written by people who don’t have any real connection or feel for what your experiences might be. In my view, it’s not surprising then that bloggers have taken hold of the Malaysian imagination in such a big way.

The other thing is that there is Nuffnang taking a very active role in making the blogging stars. They are an ad/ PR agency matching blue chip global brands such as Sony, Adidas and the like with bloggers as a way of marketing those brands. There’s money in them thar blogs, so to speak. I’m not aware of any similar sort of business taking an interest in writers and in fact, the general refrain I hear (and not just from Malaysian publishers and writers but globally) is, there’s no money in books.

Here is a trailer for Project Alpha Season One:

So, is blogging becoming the new art form for Malaysians? Are the bloggerati the new literati? Should the rest of the world take the cue from Malaysian bloggers and start recognising and celebrating bloggers as the new influencers and new creatives for today’s generation?

What do you think? Have I missed something in my outline of Malaysian writers as the poor relations of Malaysian bloggers? Please let me know, especially if you have personal experience of the writing and/ or blogging scene in Malaysia.

Photos: Sharon Bakar, from her online page
Kenny Sia, thanks to KLUE

As some of you may know, I’ve been involved in a community blog, in my local area, Dulwich OnView, which is the blog of the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery. We were invited to give a presentation on our strategy and volunteer strategy at a conference for the museums and heritage sector last week. This is my report from that event (which is also appearing on Dulwich OnView):

You may have caught The Virtual Revolution on BBC last Saturday night, which gave on overview of the way that social media has been changing our society and culture. According to the programme, 18 million people in the UK read blogs - that is about a third of the UK’s general population of 61 million. Blogs, social networks, Twitter and the like are now pretty much mainstream and and it’s not just businesses who need to adapt to these new ways of communicating. Museums, galleries, libraries and the heritage sector are more keen than ever to find out how to use these tools to engage with their visitors and users.

Which is where the Social Web Conference, organised by the UKOLN comes in. They are part of the University of Bath and are “A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities” and last Friday, they held a conference about Web 2.0 and social media for the heritage sector at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Marieke Guy, UKOLN’s research officer and organiser of this cutting edge conference invited our editorial team to give a presentation to the delegates about Dulwich OnView. It was a further opportunity to showcase our “online magazine” to the heritage sector as an example of how blogging is being used to raise the profile of the Gallery and build an online community around the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery, the charitable group that raises money and supports the work of the Gallery.

I was first up and outlined the strategy and context behind Dulwich OnView. One of the aims of the Friends is to invite more people to join as members and to encourage a diverse range of people to come along to Gallery and Friends events. The Friends put on a lot of events - films, talks, concerts and more - and the Gallery of course arranges many exhibitions with with associated art classes.

But Dulwich OnView, the Friends’ blog covers more than just these events and includes articles, videos and photo-stories about loads of arts, culture and music in Dulwich and South East London. Why? Well, we reckon that if you’re interested in all those things, you’re going to be the kind of person who’s going to enjoy Dulwich Picture Gallery - but you may not have initially thought of yourself as a “Gallery type” because, maybe, you’d never heard of the Gallery or it seems a bit too posh or stuffy and serious and is not for you. On Dulwich OnView, we hope that our readers can see that people involved in the Gallery and the Friends are just like anyone else who enjoys arts and culture in the local area and that you’ll be tempted to check out Gallery exhibitions and Friends’ events as a result.

We’ve been really lucky in attracting writers, photographers and filmmakers as well as wine experts, historians and just ordinary folk who love arts or the local area to contribute articles to the blog and to become part of the regular Dulwich OnView team - all on a voluntary basis. What this shows is that the Friends and Gallery are becoming more and more part of the local community through this blog as much as the local community becoming more aware of what the Gallery and Friends have to offer!

So how do we do it? How do we manage a team of volunteers on no budget at all and with no central office space? Next up was Angie Macdonald, web designer and Dulwich OnView trainer and editorial co-ordinator. She explained how we devised and set up a virtual system, working entirely online, to allow our bloggers and editorial team to be self-managed. There’s no “boss” although there are a handful of us who help co-ordinate the team. We all contribute a range of multimedia items about whatever we feel like (in keeping with the mission of the blog: “celebrating people and culture in the Dulwich area”). To avoid duplication of content and chaos, we note down what we’re going to post on the blog on an online editorial schedule hosted on Google Docs which our regular team can all have access to from any computer. There is a library of “how-to” online manuals which explain how to upload posts to the blog, how to add photos to our Flickr site and also sets out procedures and policies for our rota of editors. One of our team is in fact now in Belgium for her day job but can continue her role as one of our editors due to this virtual system we’ve set up! But we’re more than an online team - those of us who are around in South London meet up once every 4-6 weeks in the local pub for a drink and a catch up as well as to discuss future article ideas and plans for Dulwich OnView.

Freelance writer and museums consultant Steve Slack picked up on this theme and told the conference how his involvement in Dulwich OnView has led to some good friendships with people on the team, as well as offering opportunities to meet loads more locally through covering local events and interviewing people in the area for the blog. Articles on Dulwich OnView range from art to fitness, dancing to allotments, tattoos to wheelie bins - as well as events put on by the Friends and the Gallery. But being a blog, our posts publicising Gallery events don’t offer the usual PR blurb but we give them a quirky twist - for example, an opera themed event inspired a blog post with a special opera themed recipe for our readers.

Ingrid Beazley, former Chair of the Friends and e-learning project developer at Dulwich Picture Gallery, acts as our liaison with the Gallery and Friends. She rounded off our session with some stats that show how Dulwich OnView is having an impact on drawing more people online to the Gallery. Most of the organisations we have written about link to us from their websites. 53% of our incoming traffic comes from these local supporters. Although 98% of people visiting DOV are not searching for Dulwich Picture Gallery, 33% of onward clicks go to the DPG website, mainly to exhibitions and events pages. The Gallery links to DOV in places and 14% of our incoming traffic comes from mainly their events pages as people click through to find out more from the enhancing articles written by locals. DOV is the 9th largest driver of web traffic to the DPG website.

As to how much of that translates measurably to new Friends memberships or extra tickets bought for events and exhibitions is difficult to say at this stage as there is no system in place as yet that specifically tots that up. However, we reckon that increased web traffic to the Gallery’s main website via Dulwich OnView can only mean increased awareness of the Gallery within the local community and that can only be a good thing.

One last thing I should stress. Blogging and social media may be making headlines right now but they in no way supercede traditional marketing, which continues to play a key role for heritage organisations. Kate Knowles and her marketing team at the Gallery reach a very wide range of people through traditional media such as the BBC, broadsheets and other national and international outlets. Dulwich OnView complements their activities by making connections with a different community, especially those people who might not initially think of themselves as Gallery going types.

We are all thrilled that this blog that began as an idea over drinks among local neighbours has managed to have this small but significant impact for the Gallery and the Friends - and continues to impress the heritage sector: Dulwich OnView has been showcased at conferences in Iceland, Montreal and London and will also be featured later this year at the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado.

If you’d like to find out more or to join our team of regular contributors and editors, or if you just have the occasional article or multimedia story you’d like to submit, please email our Acting Editor via dulwichonview[at]googlemail.com (substituting @ for [at]). We’d love you to become part of our community!

Further articles about DOV:

Dulwich OnView in Iceland

Dulwich OnView in Montreal

A Museum Blog By The Community For The Community

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!

Youtube can help you hit the big time. It’s official.

I blogged awhile back about Malaysian singer songwriter Zee Avi, who was discovered by an L.A. music agent, after she uploaded a video of herself performing a song in her bedroom and now has a record deal and is touring music festivals around the world.

Now, a commercial director from Uruguay Fede Alvarez has been offered a US$30million deal from Hollywood after uploading a short sci-fi video “Ataque de Panico!” (Panic Attack!) onto Youtube:

And the short apparently only cost him around US$300…

Too good to be true?

Well, apparently, global blockbuster District 9 director Neill Blomkamp (also a commercial director) got his big break after his viral short Alive in Joburg got him the chance to work with Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings). That partnership eventually led to Blomkamp’s chance to make the feature length version of Alive in Joburg, which became District 9.

You can watch the short below:

The magic seems to work for videos that have a scifi theme or lots of special effects/ explosions. However, I wonder if any budding Woody Allen’s have had their Youtube flicks picked up by the big studios….?

The other evening, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I, along with corporate communicator Marc Wright, gave a talk at the Asia Pacific Technology Network (APTN) on Asia and the Interactive Web, at the invitation of Louis Turner, APTN’s chief executive. (Thanks, Louis, for inviting us!) APTN is a group for people interested in Asian technology and the evening’s guest included technology and patent lawyers, telecommunications entreprenuers and Asian affairs specialists.

Silvia spoke on the shift of economic power from the West to Asia and presented some case studies on use of social media in China by companies such as Toyota. I discussed the use of social media by the Asian diaspora and how the internet is helping an emerging class of affluent, influential and articulate Asians network around the globe. In counterpoint to the two of us, Marc gave the view from the West, highlighting that businesses no longer controlled their messages and the importance of engaging in social media with an authentic voice.

One of the things I enjoy about blogging and social media is how it has enabled me to connect with a range of talented and creative people whom I would never have met otherwise. As I went through my slides, I was struck that two of the three case studies I presented were due to Malaysians I had met via blogging:

• Photographer Steven Lee first approached me via my blog to ask if he could photograph me for his book on prominent Malaysians (as it turned out, I couldn’t participate in the end because, technically, I’m now British, but we’ve remained friends and hook on on Facebook, via our blogs and also in the real world). He was my first case study that evening - an example of how an Asian living in London networks globally through social media to raise the profile of his photography business.

• I learnt about Rantauan.com, the Malay social network, through journalist Zaharah Othman, aka blogger Kak Teh. I left a comment on her blog once and she then came along to read my blog. We corresponded via our respective comments pages and then by email and then finally met up in London for coffee. I’ve since interviewed her about political blogging in Malaysia for my book and she’s written a number of articles about my books for papers in Malaysia.

To top it all, I was really pleased to finally meet in person Chinese-English translator Nicky Harman who has written for this blog. She contacted me a few years ago out of the blue asking if I knew how she might find a publisher for her translation of Striking Root. Directly as a result of her blog post about the translation, a publisher got in touch and was interested to publish the book. As it turned out, Nicky went with another publisher in the end but there’s the power of blogging for you. Anyway, unknown to me, Nicky is a member of APTN and so the other evening, we were able to meet for the first time in real life!

Here are some pics of the evening, including one of me with Nicky:

I usually focus on blogging for business so it’s nice to be reminded that most of the 170 million blogs out there are by ordinary people writing about their daily lives and personal feelings. It was the We Feel Fine project that was the big reminder - it’s a project led by computer scientist, Jonathan Harris, that explores “human emotion on a global scale” by harvesting emotions expressed on blogs whenever the words “I feel…” are found.

The emotions are gathered and sorted in different ways and shown in six “movements” - madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics and mounds - which are essentially different visualisations of the data. You can see good feelings and bad feelings as well as the geographic location, age and gender of the person expressing those feelings. The project’s website suggests that this living artwork can offer specific answers to questions like: “Do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest?”

You need to launch an applet - which can take up to 20 seconds to load - in order to experience this amazing artwork. Click on the image below and it should take you to the We Feel Fine page: to launch the applet from there, click on the last sentence of the first paragraph (”We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements, each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. These movements are represented in the We Feel Fine applet.”)

I love the way the bubble of feelings cluster round the mouse cursor when you click on the screen in Madness - if you hover it over one of the bubbles, it will show you the location of the feeling and a brief idea of what the feeling is.

Then in Murmurs, you can see each latest feeling expressed somewhere out there in the world appear on the screen and if you click on the phrase, you’ll be taken to the blog. So “i feel so detached from everything i used to stand for” takes me to a blog post You Are My Brand Of Heroin - tonight is the night to let it go by xshadowsoflovex.

So how does this artwork make me feel? I feel more connected with the millions of people out there in the world.