Archive for the 'ZenGuide Projects' Category

Things have been quiet on this blog for the last little while because ZenGuide is in the process of evolving.

We’ll post more details in the near future. But to give you a taster…

Social Media Trainer and Blog Project Manager, Angie Macdonald is striking out to set up her own Web Design Business. We’ll be announcing the launch of her new site and contact details soon.

As for me, I’m evolving the ZenGuide brand from pure social media consultancy to include guidance on business and career development. Helping clients with their business and career development forms the basis of the coaching I give on how to communicate in an authentic way using social media. And I’d like to adjust the focus of my services to bring those aspects out more strongly.

Authentic communication is about aligning what you say with who you really are and what you truly value. Through the process of a business and marketing audit with my clients, I’ve been privileged to help them define those core values in themselves and in their business so that they can blog with authenticity. I’m excited about re-aligning ZenGuide’s core services so that I can guide clients towards authentic success not just in their communications but also in their life, business and career.

Coming up will be a new site design, a new logo and a new service for professionals looking to develop authentic success in their business and careers… so stay tuned.

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You can read a case study analysis of Dulwich OnView in an unpublished extract from my book International Communications Strategy (co-authored with Silvia Cambie) via the online pdf below: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

~~~

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

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

These are the slides for my talk at London Metropolitan University, Business School on Thursday evening 15 October:

… together with the full length email interview I conducted with Martin Smit, host of The NBT Podcast:

If you’re doing something remarkable to become a “Social Media Idol”, I’d love to hear about it - I am researching a book by that same title and I’m looking for great case studies. Leave me a comment or email me via the Contact page.

I’d like to thank Milan Todorovic, Senior Lecturer/Course Leader for Music and Media Management at LMU for inviting my co-author Silvia Cambie and me to speak at the University. You can follow us on Twitter.com - Milan = @LondonMetUni), Silvia = @xculture and I am @fusionview .

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.

by Angie Macdonald

We’ve recently enjoyed working with Savile Row tailor, Carol Alayne, to create her new business blog Tailoring for Women.

There are very few female Savile Row tailors, so it was a real privilege to get an insight into Carol’s world and the unique service she offers.

I used to associate Savile Row with men in suits making suits for men, but things are changing, and Carol Alayne is part of that change. She has twenty years’ experience and a particular passion for tailoring for women. Her background in banking means that she fully understands the tailoring needs of professional women and what their jobs require of them.

Through our coaching sessions on how to use blogging as part of her marketing strategy, we got to know more about Carol. Particularly fascinating is the fact that she learned how to sew on her grandmother’s knee at the age of five and started her first tailoring business when she was fourteen. Her other passion is playing the fiddle, which means she also understands the tailoring needs of musicians very well.

Together with our web design associate, David Robertson, we worked with Carol to design a site that would function both as a website and a blog, with the blog being the focal point.

The Tailoring for Women blog and website is now live. On the blog, Carol shares her expertise and insight on the tailoring industry. She is also creating a knowledge base that will demystify the process of the bespoke tailoring tradition and educate present and potential clients. Do go over and check it out. You will be able to learn about the differences between bespoke and ready-made and where to find extraordinary fabrics, for example. I was fascinated to learn that in many mass-produced ready-made garments the seams are fused together with glue!

Carol also has many high profile clients, including the British Olympic Shooting Team, Dame Kiri te Kanawa and one of my heroines, performance artist Laurie Anderson. From time to time she features garments she is making for high profile clients so it’s a good way to see who’s wearing what.

I hope Carol will enjoy blogging as much as we enjoyed showing her the ins-and-outs of blog posting, linking and commenting. We wish her every success!

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.

Here are the links to articles and other resources on the web which formed part of my research for the Digital Spaces Panel discussion at the Bookseller’s Digitise or Die conference today. The list shows only the latest 30 items - to see more items, click on “Digital Spaces Panel - links” to be taken to all my research items on this topic.

I’m also grateful to the following people who kindly shared with me their knowledge about the use of digital spaces in publishing:

Ian Metcalfe, Hodder Faith and Hodder General - Publisher, Bibles and Digital Media

Lucy Luck, Lucky Luck Associates - Literary Agent

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