Protected: LCC - Social Media: Free for All? - Resources
Posted by Yang-May Ooi on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 6:12pm
Posted by Yang-May Ooi on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 6:12pm
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 2007Members: £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.
Posted by Yang-May Ooi on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 6:59am
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.
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
Posted by Yang-May Ooi on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 1:00am
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
Posted by Yang-May Ooi on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 1:01am
Posted by Yang-May Ooi on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 1:00am
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
Posted by Yang-May Ooi on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 1:00am
I am delighted to report that my associate Silvia Cambie and I have been commissioned by business book publishers Kogan Page to write a book on New Trends in International Public Relations, aimed at business communicators, PR professionals and marketeers.
I will be focusing on the impact of social media on business communications and how PR practitioners can incorporate social media into their communications and marketing strategies. Silvia will be focusing on all the other key issues for practitioners such as corporate social responsibility, crisis communications and current hot topics and trends affecting international public relations.
We both have a strong interest in cross-cultural issues. Silvia is Italian and has lived and worked across Europe, speaking several European languages fluently. As for me, I have links with Malaysia and the Far East as well as being now based in London, UK. In today’s globalised world, PR practitioners are increasingly needing to work from a cross-cultural perspective so Silvia and I will be exploring the relevance and impact of cross-cultural issues for business communicators online and also offline.
I’ll be letting you know more details about the social media and cross-cultural issues I’ll be researching in the next few weeks. Silvia and I will both be blogging about our research and the progress of the book on our respective blogs and we hope very much that you will all be able to help us by adding your comments or sharing your experiences and thoughts with us. I will certainly give credit in the book and/or on this website to anyone whose contribution I use in the book - please see the contributors release notice for more details regarding contributions.
My dilemma is whether I should blog about this book primarily on my social media blog ZenGuide, because obviously, it’s all about social media - or, on my cross-cultural blog Fusion View, because obviously, it’s also all about cross-culture. If I blog about the book on both of them, will it get confusing if different people comment on one or other of the blogs? Would it be better to choose one of them and then stick to it? But Fusion View has a great international, cross-cultural community there already and I really would love to hear what everyone has to say there. But my cross-cultural readers may not be so interested in social media as such? But if I blog about the book on ZenGuide only, will I lose the cross-cultural dimension by focusing on my social media readers? You see my dilemma. What do you think?
Further information
Silvia’s blog X-Culture is at www.chandacom-xculture.com.
bkprj
Posted by Yang-May Ooi on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 1:00am
ZenGuide is the blog and social media guide by Yang-May Ooi, writer and social media consultant. She is also the creator of the multimedia online "magazine" Fusion View. The ZenGuide site explores how communicating effectively through social media can contribute to your personal and professional success. We also highlight trends and news about blogging about social media in plain English!