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presentation on meaningful playfulness

My Headshift colleague Eliot (@eliotf) pointed me towards an interesting presentation, Hiding Data, Content and Technology in Real World Games, shared by Chris Thorpe recently.

I love how Chris describes layering a highly useful interface on top of play around social objects, utilising ambient data collection and injecting aspects of the real world such as physical places and objects into his message. Well worth a look:

Hiding data, content and technology in real world games

View more documents from Chris Thorpe.

curating, not moderating, the flow of content and participation

[I originally posted this on the Headshift Blog last week where it got a lot of attention and some useful comments. It was also re-blogged on Social Media Today where it has now been read nearly 2500 times.] User generated content is, for many media companies and other organisations, more of a problem than a solution. Vague calls to action lead to waves of irrelevant content submitted by audiences who have taken time, effort, and in some instances spent money to do so - only for that content to, in most instances, be ignored. Online communities require moderation to keep discussions on the right side of the law. Breaking stories of importance, or topics that capture the imagination, lead to floods of content that quickly overwhelm processes and technical platforms.

In all these situations, which will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked at the social media collision point between audiences and organisations, very little of value is extracted from what can be a costly exercise, primarily because most "social platforms" have been built to pull in audiences and allow moderators to police user activity.

Whilst there is still a place for such propositions, particularly where calls to action can be closely aligned to the editorial or other content that is of value to the owners of that proposition, in many instances it makes sense to move away from moderation towards curation.

A simple enough idea, in practice curation of external and social content has been relatively difficult for media brands and other organisations to put themselves at the centre of the flow of information and content around them. That, at least, was my experience at the BBC where, for more than seven years, I (and others) tried to come up with a solution to this problem, culminating in the well received but ultimately unsustainable, at least within the (non)budgetary confines in which it existed, BBC Manchester Blog.

A few months ago, one of our technology partners, eVectors, introduced me to a tool they'd created which, with the right editorial strategy wrapped around it, can make the job of finding, curating, editorialising and socialising content far more efficient - and interesting - than I've seen before.

So, with our friends Paolo and Cristian at eVectors, Nick, myself and several others here at Headshift created a demonstration which we call ClimatePulse. As we say on the site:

"Climate Pulse tracks a wide range of source for information, comment and content about the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15). It's different from mere aggregation services because there is an editorial layer and a social layer. The editorial layer allows curators to highlight specific pieces of content. The Social layer gets users involved in tagging and categorising content. In the near future, you'll even be able to take away a widget containing the flow from Climate Pulse - a widget that lets your friends, contacts or audience to not only consume but to contribute their own content, straight from your site, back into that flow."

In plain English, Climate Pulse basically monitors and aggregates blog posts, news websites, twitter tweets and a wide range of other sources we've configured in the backend. An editor can then curate this content and display it as they wish - for example letting the flow appear as a raw feed, tagging or geo-tagging content, featuring the best stuff, etc. Here's a diagramme showing the flow of content into the system, the editorial and tagging layer, and the social layer:

 

For the social layer, in this instance we've asked users to declare an interest based upon work based affiliation - energy business, business, government, environmental NGO or journalist. As can be seen in the screenshot below, users then determine whether pieces of content describe a problem or a solution, and add free tags to describe, in their own language, why:

All content is tagged, either by the original author, the editor, users, or by the system scraping the content for key words. When visitors click on a tag, say "nuclear energy", they get a graph showing how each of the five categories of users voted. Using this example, it's likely that government and energy business will see nuclear energy as a solution and, because of they've tagged the content, we can see that they feel it's clean, brings jobs, is future proof, etc. Environmentalists, however, area likely to see nuclear energy as a problem because, again based on likely tags, disposal of spent fuel, mining, accidents, etc. Here's a few possible use cases:

• If the UN, which is organising the Copenhagen Climate conference, or an environmental NGO was using Climate Pulse, they'd be able to see, at a glance, what issues people agree upon and why, and could push delegates to spend time negotiating on topics where it's necessary to do so.

• Businesses wanting to send the message, "we know you care about this issue, we're doing what we can understand your views, and we want to be part of the solution" could use a proposition like this to do exactly that.

• A media organisation, wanting to provide coverage and analysis of a range of viewpoints, based upon content from a wide range of sources, could use a tool like this to create a compelling editorial proposition that feeds content to journalists.

One last feature, which would help exposure to the proposition spread virally, is that we can easily build widgets of the flow from the page, and enable site owners interested in a particular issue, for example deforestation, to create a widget that displays, on their own site, that content. Social features could then be made available, meaning that the audience on third party sites could participate on the sites they choose to visit, rather than visiting Climate Pulse itself, and that participation, likely to be ranking, voting or comments, could feed back into the general flow to be highlighted and editorialised by the site curator.

It's been, and I hope will continue to be, an interesting example of how Headshift, working with technology partners, can help implement exciting and useful propositions that extract real value from audience participation, wherever that participation takes place. It is, to me, a giant leap in the direction of resolving the issue many have grappled with in the past, which is how to find and reflect the content and opinions of a wide range of participants, without being overwhelmed, as is so often the case, by the flood of content and rising moderation costs.

The model here is a nice example of the social business archetypes that my colleague Lee Bryant described in this earlier post and it's easy to see how we could use the ideas here not just for climate change but any topic or event, such as an election, a popular television programme, a brand, or the research or strategic work being done by an organisation.

You can see the alpha release of Climate Pulse at http://www.climatepulse.org

user centred news

[I originally posted this on the Headshift blog last Thursday] Hot on the heels of my post yesterday about finding, aggregating and curating content from third party sources, including blogs and social media services, comes word of the Twitter Times which finds and delivers news that's highly relevant to me - straight from twitter.

For the past couple of years, I've most often found out about breaking news stories and other information of interest to me through my friends or contacts online. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Why, afterall, should an editor's perception of what may or may not be of interest to me be any more accurate than that of the people I have deliberately chosen as friends, follow, or receive updates from?

The protests following the elections in Iran are a perfect example of this. The outcome of elections in Iran isn't something I'd usually follow, or even be aware of, but when I saw dozens, perhaps even hundreds of people tweeting and posting facebook updates about it, I was drawn in. It's something, I think, that happened to many people around the World. Likewise, when there was an earthquake in the UK in 2008 I was woken by the tremors and, a few moments later, as I fell back to sleep, had my suspicions that it was an earthquake confirmed when my phone, which at the time was set up to receive tweets from friends via SMS, started vibrating away with text messages. There have been dozens of stories in between, and since, where the same thing has happened - the metafilters that I've created bring me news faster than broadcast or print news ever could.

Also, it's fairly common sense that the news that is important to you is the news that affects, or interests, your friends and contacts. I used to use an RSS reader, populated with over 100 feeds, religiously for hours each day. I abandoned that more than six months ago when I realised that I could still get links to the very best of that same body of content by simply monitoring twitter.

The danger in this, of course, is that, the breadth of news and other content I'm made aware of is likely to be somewhat more narrow than if I bought a newspaper and browsed through it. Each Saturday, when I buy the Guardian Weekend, I stumble across many stories - many of them interesting, some of them important - that I hadn't seen during the week.

So what does the Twitter Times do? It looks at the tweets from your friends, pulls out the links they've shared, and creates a "newspaper" from those links. Here's a screenshot of the newspaper generated for Rich (@dogwonder), one of my Headshift colleagues who pointed me to the service:

I've only had time for a brief look, but it appears that the service delivers content that's both interesting and highly relevant to the user. And that - user centred news - is exactly the sort of news I want.

using behavioural data to create compelling content

[Originally posted to the Headshift blog last Friday]

Most owners of social software systems use the data generated through usage in their reporting of metrics. So, alongside the standard metrics such as unique users, page impressions, time spent, etc, social tools often enable actions which can also be counted and reported, such as registrations, content submissions, comments generated by that content, etc. The data generated by social activities can also be useful in identifying key gatekeepers within online communities, or relationships that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. Headshift does this sort of analysis for a growing number of clients, and one of our case studies describes a project we did with the BBC to better understand that people who comment on a BBC Blog is likely to also post comments on other BBC blogs.

Usage data can also make for compelling content. An example that many are likely to be familiar with are Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" and "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item" features, which use data on what users view and purchase to make better recommendation. Many news and media sites are also waking up to the value of exposing data generated by the behaviour and actions of users to, for example, highlight the "most read" and "most emailed" pieces of content.

Today I came across Facebook's Peace Project which turns user behaviour into genuinely interesting content. The project looks at user profile data on location, religion and political stance and ties it to data generated when users add each other as friends to provide in interesting glimpse at friendships that cross unlikely geographic, political or religious boundaries. So, for example, in the graph below we can see that, over the proceeding 24 hours, 5,085 friendships were confirmed by users in Israel and those in Palestine:

The story this data tells is interesting in that it demonstrates that, despite geo-political barriers, people are still making connections - and this gives at least a glimmer of hope that, despite political events, people can and do continue to connect on the individual level. There's no reason why similar ideas couldn't be deployed in other sectors:

• within enterprise systems, behavioural data can be used to better understand how organisations function, and how emergent practice is, or isn't, supported by existing bureaucratic structures
• consumer and audience behaviour can be used, as seen above and as I wrote yesterday in my post about Twitter Times, to make user centred content recommendations or to gauge, as we're finding in a current Headshift project, customer inquiries about products or services so that resources can be better deployed in responding
• public officials could use such data to pinpoint resources at emerging areas of interest or need - google has been doing interesting work on this, creating a swine flu map based on searches

We're only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making best use of the data that is generated by user participation using social tools but things are starting to get very interesting indeed.

guide to using social media (in 6500 words)

Late last year, and early this year, I embarked on a social media training roadshow (for Headshift) that took me to the far corners of England, Scotland and Wales. My purpose was to show each of the finalist communities taking part in NESTA's Big Green Challenge, a million pound environmental competition now nearing it's end, how social tools could help them communicate more effectively both within their groups as well as with stakeholders and other external audiences.

Alongside the training, which was provided on-site in villages, towns and cities - and on one island - I wrote a series of eight blog posts, totally 6500 words, aimed at introducing a wider audience to the use of social media services, social networking sites and content sharing platforms. The original posts can still be found, for now, on the Big Green Challenge Blog but I have, below, brought them together as a single post.

This content is now also available as a 15 page pdf (250k): Download Guidetousingsocialmedia

Part One: Introducing social media and the whole web as your canvas

Social media, as Vicki Costello pointed out in her post here last week, has lots of potential to help individuals, groups and communities to communicate more effectively. This is primarily because social media - a melting pot of social connectivity, conversations and content sharing - allows people not only to create and disseminate their messages in their own way and on their own terms, but also creates opportunities for:

• direct channels of engagement with and between stakeholders
• enhanced transparency of purpose and action
• increased opportunities for communities to form and grow around ideas
• keep members of those communities better informed and involved
• increase the visibility of the collective knowledge and creativity within the community
• reach out to new audiences of potential supporters

It's pretty powerful stuff so, over the next six to eight weeks, I'll be writing a series of posts - this one theoretical, the rest practical - here to help you learn how to get the best out of emerging social media tools and techniques. This week, in what is likely to be the most theoretical post of the bunch, I'll set the scene by defining social media for those who are a bit unsure what we're on about and will talk about what I see as the key to success on the web today: the ability to use the whole web as your canvas. Over the coming weeks my posts will offer more practical advice on how to actually get started using some of the services and tools mentioned here today.

As I started writing this post, I realised that I didn't really have a one line definition of social media, so I used a social networking tool called twitter to send a short message to my followers, essentially friends and contacts who subscribe to my messages, or tweets as they are called on twitter, asking if they might help. Within a few minutes I had half a dozen thoughtful responses including:

"Social media is a new form of technology based communication. It fosters dialogue, transparency and collaboration." - Stefan

"like real life, just electric?" - Dominic

"Not media, but using technology for a conversation that connects, enables and leads to action, either online or offline." - Jason

"Making things, sharing them, seeing what other people have made, commenting on those things and adding to them." - Chris

My favourite response came from Howard Rheingold, a widely respected author, University Professor, past speaker at NESTA events and a longtime friend who I credit with helping me land my first real job helping build online communities back in 1998, who wrote:

"Many to many media that gains value as more people participate, and which enabled people to connect with each other."

There are hundreds of services and tools which could justifiably fall within the definition of social media - below are just a few that spring to mind:

• Social networking services such as Facebook, Bebo and Myspace
• Content sharing sites including flickr and YouTube
• Online discussion spaces such as message boards, forums and chat rooms
• Blogging platforms which allow easy publishing and more, including Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and others
• Micro-blogging services including Twitter, which is mentioned above
• Collaboration platforms, such as wiki's

The important thing to understand about each of these services is that that they tend to do one thing very well indeed, but are less good at other things. Social media is no exception to the cliche, which often rings true, that you've got to have the right tools to do the job. So, for example, if you want to post photographs and have discussions with other keen photographers, you'd be hard pressed to find a better place than flickr to do that but you probably wouldn't want to use flickr for collaborative working.

This is where we start talking about using the whole web as your canvas (with much owed to Tom Loosemore, who did much to bring this idea to life for me) - an idea which has, at it's root, the idea that the internet is a vast network of interlinking conversations.

In the past, many people and organisations cared only about the growth of their own website. This is a bit like trying to plant a single apple tree at the end of a fenced garden. It might blossom, and bare a few apples, but it's unlikely to flourish without other apples trees in the close vicinity with which to cross-pollinate. Uploading an image or video straight to your website or blog does exactly this - it services the audience already inside the fence but it's impact is confined, and thus smaller.

When you think of the whole web as your canvas, you use links to send your visitors to other places on the web to bring visitors back to you. You distribute content all over the web - photos on flickr, posts on your blog, short messages from out in the field to twitter, podcasts to odeo - each time reaching out to different, and potentially new, audiences. You participate widely, and wider participation takes place around you. It's like planting a whole bunch of trees in an orchard, and watching them each gain from, and contribute to, the success of all the other trees.

The most effective way to grow audiences online is becoming less about having a single destination for people to visit and more about having multiple destinations, a sort of distributed web presence, scattered all over the web. But before you dive right in, make sure you

• Seek out and find the places online where people might be interested in your content and your message
• Learn about how people participate in those spaces
• Make sure that your contributions would be welcome
• Be transparent about who you are and what you're trying to achieve

Before you know it, you'll be growing audiences all over the web. Some of them may very well never visit your website but does that really matter if, regardless of where they're doing it, more and more people are able to learn about, and engage with, what you're trying do?

This post is part of series on using social media to get your message out and, as I'm sure you're gathered from this post, do a whole lot more than just that. In the posts which follow, I'll be providing more practical, hands-on advice, how-to's and inspiring examples to help you get the most out of social media. Please do feel encouraged to follow or join in the conversation.

Part Two: Reaching new audiences with photos online

In this post, the second in a series about getting the most out of using social media, I'll discuss a few of the different ways the Big Green Challengers, Finalists and other groups can use photographs to tell their story and reach out to new audiences.

Most people building a website would upload their pages and images directly to their web host. When people visit those pages, the images, along with text and any other content, is displayed. The problem with this approach is that the only people who will see those images are those who already know about the website, probably because they are familiar with the organisation or individual behind it. There is another way which, through the clever use of social media, can help you gain more from posting your images online.

Photo sharing websites such as flickr, picasa, photobucket and smugmug (to name a few) allow people to upload, store, share, describe, discuss and sometimes print digital images. Each of these services has large audiences of people actively seeking out photographs for information, fun, or personal or professional re-use. By posting your images here, then embedding them in your own website, you're potentially getting your image - and through it your ideas, message or organisation - in front of a whole new audience.

So here's the technique:

1. choose and register for a photo-sharing website
2. upload your photograph to that site
3. describe your images properly using titles, descriptions and tags (tags are words or phrases that tell other people what subjects or themes your content relates to)
4. make sure you put a link back to the related content page on your website
5. copy the embed code, which you'll usually find next to or below the image on most photo-sharing websites (although on flickr you need to go to the All Sizes tab above the photo), and paste it into the html source code of your blog post or web page

Last weekend, I was in Brecon Beacons running a social media workshop with the Big Green Challenge Finalists there.

The photo above was taken outside the training venue. I've used the instructions provided here to uploaded, tag and link from that photo to this blog. Here's how it looks on flickr.

With any luck, at least a few of the people who search for photos of Brecon Beacons, Wales or any of the other tags I've used to describe the photo on flickr, will stumble across my photo, want to know more, and click the link. If just one of those visitors - people who are unlikely to have any previous contact with me or the Big Green Challenge - decides they like what they see here, is encouraged to learn more, and perhaps even joins the efforts of the communities, then the very minimal additional effort required to go about posting images in this way will have been well spent.

In the coming weeks, I'll be offering further advice and step-by-step instructions to help you make the most of social media tools and services to tell your story, share knowledge, engage with stakeholders, and reach out to new supporters. In the next post, the third in this series, I'll show you how to build google maps and geo-tag your photos and other content.

Part Three: Getting Started Making Google Maps

Many of the Big Green Challenge communities are reaching out, and creating a greater impact, by working with people and organisations across their areas or regions. Maps give those communities a way to visually documenting this.

There are quite a few ways to create and share a map online. The easiest method I've come across is to use  google maps which offers a straight-forward, drag and drop interface. More advanced tools, such as MapBuilder, can be used to create richer, but more complex, map mash-ups where data or other content is plotted on a map, sometimes automatically, as can be seen on the now famous Chicago Crime Map.

I am often surprised how many people use the maps I've created. My St. Albans wi-fi map, for example, has been viewed nearly 78,000 times in less than six months and at least two or three visitors a day follow the link from my google map to my blog.

Below is a map I created to display the location of each of the 10 Big Green Challenge finalist communities:

View Larger Map

Here's how you can make your own:

1. Create a google account
2. Go to Google Maps
3. Click "My Maps"
4. Click Create Map
5. Name your map and give it a description (don't forget to link to your website if you have one)
6. Add points to your map by dragging and dropping the pin to the correct location
7. Save your map
8. Click on the link icon at the top right corner of your map and get the embed code
9. Embed the html code for your map into your blog or website

That's all you need to do to get started making basic google maps which, despite their simplicity, are often a powerful and compelling way to tell the story of what you or your organisation is achieving in the real world.

This post is part of a series of guests posts about using social media to create a distributed web presence. My previous posts have discussed the benefits of using the whole web as your canvas and putting photos online. In next week's post I'll show you how to put video online.

Part Four: Sharing Videos Online

This is the fourth in a series guest posts I'm making here to help groups and individuals spread their ideas and information more widely using social media. Previous posts in the series have discussed photo sharing and making google maps. In this post I'll introduce video sharing.

If you're looking for a post that covers advanced video editing then this probably isn't the post for you as it's more about sharing videos online than it is about shooting and editing videos. Most of the numerous videos I've published online over the years have been unedited, single take clips recorded on a camera phone or ordinary digital stills camera.

Don't get me wrong - a proper, dedicated digital video camera will almost always help you achieve better audio and video quality but I tend only to use mine to capture longer videos of important moments, such as birthdays and other events, with the intention of eventually getting around to editing them complete with titles, transitions, etc. For anything else, the camera in my pocket is the camera I end up using the most and, for me, that's historically been a mobile phone. It's probably worth noting that the gap between the quality of a dedicated video camera and the portability of a mobile device has been bridged by the tiny, hard-drive based flip camera which some of the Big Green Challenge finalists are using.

YouTube is probably the place where most people have their first encounter with video sharing online. Registration is free and it's simple to upload and share a video, particularly as YouTube has created a section for user created how-to's and help videos should you find any part of the process unclear.

There are, of course, other video sharing services. These include Vimeo, which has a really slick interface allowing people to leave comments at points within a video rather than just beneath it, Blip.tv, Viddler and others. Flickr, most well known for photosharing and appearing in my post here on that topic, also allows the upload of short video clips. NowPublic, which describes itself as a news site created by it's users, would be a good choice for anyone with content which could be described as "newsy" - including activism - because it draws an audience that would engage with that sort of content.

All the services above are free and work in basically the same way - anyone can view videos (and other content) but to post comment users usually have to register. Once registered, users can begin uploading, describing (using titles or tags), then sharing their content. Some might be surprised that I'm not going to give this process the step by step treatment here but most of the services I've listed provide their own easy to follow video tutorials which I'm unlikely to be able to match.

So what is the key to successful video sharing online?

1. Choose the right service to reach your target audience - YouTube has mass appeal but Vimeo, NowPublic and others are more likely to reach certain niche audiences.
2. Consider publishing your video under a creative commons license which allows others to use your video for their own purposes.
3. Make sure you allow others to use the embed code to display your video on their blogs, myspace pages, facebook profiles, etc
4. Always link from the videos you post online back to your website so that people who stumble across your video content can follow the link back to find out more about you.

I hope that, by following the tips above, that you gain a lot more from creating and posting video online.

This post is part of a series of guest posts about social media I'm publishing here on the Big Green Challenge Blog. The next post, which will follow in a few days, will be about using mobile phones to document and publish your story using mobile enabled services such as qik, twitter and wordpress.

Part Five: Taking the Internet Everywhere

This post is part of a series of guest posts I've been writing here on the Big Green Challenge blog to help individuals and organisations get more out of using the internet, in particular social media tools and services, to create and share content and ideas with a wider audience. Previous posts in the series have discussed photo sharing, making google maps and video sharing.

Not so long ago, if someone wanted to use the internet they'd have to physically plug an ethernet cable into a router or dial in over a phoneline. Nowadays, many people have wifi in their offices or homes - and, increasingly, wifi access is being offered at a small charge or free by businesses and in public places - enabling them to move around, untethered, from room to room whilst using the internet.

The next big thing, and the topic of this post, is the ability to access and share content on the go, wherever you happen to be and whenever you want, using mobile broadband.

Mobile broadband comes in several flavours, one of which is a 3G dongle. I recently purchased one of these small devices that plugs into my laptop's USB port and gives me high speed access to the internet, and have found it particularly useful when I want to do some work on the train. Most of the Big Green Challenge Finalists have projects that involve getting out and doing things within their community and a laptop giving them internet access wherever they are could almost certainly come in handy. You might be surprised that mobile broadband has really come down in price - I bought my dongle for £30 and it's pay as you go tariff starts at £2 a day.

If you're interested in learning more, a friend of mine, journalist Adam Tinworth, recently wrote a helpful review of his experience of installing and using a 3g dongle.

The other type of mobile broadband is to use a mobile phone to access the internet. Some will remember the introduction many years ago of WAP which allowed stripped down, text only versions of websites to be viewed on a mobile phone screen. Things have moved on a lot since then, with some current mobiles providing a browser based internet experience that looks and acts just like that on a desktop or laptop computer. So anything you might be able to accomplish on the web - searching for content, booking a train ticket, sending an email - is now possible using just a mobile phone with a data connection.

Many current mobile phones also allow users to install applications, just like on a computer, that make it possible to capture and share content online including text, blog posts, geo-location, photos and videos. In fact, it's now possible to actually stream live video from some mobile phones to the web - effectively giving individuals much of the live broadcasting capability previously enjoyed only by major news organisations.

In my next guest post here, I'll discuss some of the applications and services that turn mobile phones into powerful tools for capturing moments and creating and sharing content online.

Part Six: Live and Direct With Your Mobile

In this week's guest post about using social media I'll be discussing how mobile phones can be used as powerful tools for capturing moments and for creating and sharing content online.

Most current mobile phones come with a reasonable quality camera built in and the ability to add and run applications over the phone network. Because I carry my phone with my wherever I go, I often find myself capturing moments, places, people and things that I never would have previously - and because my phone is connected to the internet using a standard called 3g, I can instantly upload and share my photos and videos online without needing to connect to my computer.

There are many different mobile phones, networks and mobile enabled services to choose from and the ones I mention here might not be, for you, the best or least expensive so do look around. It's also worth noting that, unless you have an unlimited data plan, uploading or streaming from your mobile can be very expensive and there are horror stories abound about people who have used data intensive mobile applications whilst abroad - it's best to check with your network provider before getting started.

In January, a passenger on a ferry across the Hudson River in New York used his mobile phone to take a now iconic photo of a partially submerged plane in the water and upload it to TwitPic, alerting his friends on Twitter in the process. The now iconic image of a partially submerged plane in the Hudson River, taken by a passenger on the iPhone and uploaded using TwitPic, is a great example of the utility of having a network enabled camera with you at all times.

As I've traveled to meet each of the Big Green Challenge finalists, I've used twitter and twitpic to update my friends as to my movements and, through doing so, have picked up all sorts of local knowledge that's either smoothed my way on public transportation or helped me locate free wifi access, a few good coffees and to avoid at least one bad meal. That's genuinely useful.

Another service I've used widely is Zonetag, a photo uploader created by Yahoo Research Labs, which uploads geo-tagged photographs to Flickr, the photo-sharing service I discussed in an earlier post here. There are other uploaders out there - shozu is a popular one - so it's worth trying a few to see which works best for your needs.

You can also shoot and stream live video from a mobile handset using services such as Qik and Flixwagon. I personally use the former but, as far as I can see, both offer pretty much the same core functionality - to stream video live and to see comments from people who are watching remotely. Although consumer servies, news organisations, including the BBC, have started using these services.

Last year, I used a mobile phone to capture and live stream BBC News Technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, streaming a mobile interview with Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of online listings service Craigslist:

In addition to services that allow users to create and upload images and videos, most major blogging and social networking platforms have created applications that work on a range of mobile phones and - better still - most of these applications are free or very inexpensive.

I hope you found this quick overview of mobile services interesting and useful. Please do leave a comment if you've worked one of these tools into what you're doing online or as an organisation.

In next week's blog post on social media I'll be talking about blogging, both as a type of service or tool and as a technique.

Part Seven: Key Techniques for Successful Blogging

Over the past few weeks, I've published a number of posts here to help organisations and individuals to get started using social media tools and services to inform and engage. This post will discuss blogs, both as a tool and a technique, for pulling it all together.

My previous posts discussed various ways of creating and publishing content of various types, and making it available on services where audiences are pro-actively seeking out and consuming that type of content - so, for example, using the photo-sharing service Flickr for photos and the video-sharing service YouTube for video. Here's an index to those posts:

1. Introduction: social media and the whole web as your canvas
2. Reaching new audiences with photo-sharing
3. Sharing your videos online
4. Getting started making google maps
5. Taking the internet everywhere
6. Live and direct with your mobile

The approach I've suggested, using the whole web as your canvas, is a clever way of getting your ideas in front of new audiences. My view is that it's more important that people consume and interact with my content, wherever that content is, than to put all my eggs in one basket by creating a single, destination website that is viewed only by those who are already engaged.

A blog, which is essentially an easy to use, template based content management system where posts, sometimes called entries, are typically arranged in reverse chronological order. Because they allow content to be pulled in or embedded from elsewhere, including many of the services I've previously discussed in this series of posts, blogs can be used to pull all your web based content together in one place so that, once people do find a photo or video or other piece of content out on the web, you have a central place to link them into should they wish to know more.

In my previous role as Head of Blogging at the BBC, I used to run one day workshops to help bloggers and other editorial and production staff learn how to use their blog. Almost the entire day was taken up with discussion of technique and creating content rather than step by step instructions on how to actually create a blog or post an entry. I continue to believe that understanding blogging as a technique, rather than as a tool, is the best way to approach blog training. None of it's hard, but getting the techniqueright is by far more important.

There are a number of free or low cost tools which can be used to create a blog including Wordpress, which is the platform used by this blog, Blogger and Typepad. Once registered, users can very easily create a new blog. All that's normally required is a name for the blog and, once that's been decided, there are usually a number of predefined design templates to choose from. Look and feel is controlled independently of content so, in most instances, the design can be changed at the click of the button at any time without affecting the actual content of the blog.

Once you've set up a blog, you'll probably want to create your "about" page where you tell readers who you are and what you're aiming to achieve. You might also want to add contact details.

Next, you may want to add links to other websites or blogs - your organisation, your pages on other social media services, other people or groups saying interesting things, etc. In Wordpress, you do this by going into the dashboard and adding a links widget. In blogger this functionality is called a blogroll and in typepad is called a typelist. Linking is one of the most important things a blogger can do. Not only does it introduce your readers to other sites they might be interested in, but it also alerts - because most bloggers look at statistics showing how many visitors they've had and where those visitors have come from - other bloggers to you existance of your blog. I refer to a link tap because it's a bit like tapping someone on the shoulder to let them know you're there.

Once you've added an about page and links, you will probably want to create your first blog post. A lot of people find it difficult to get started but there is an easy way to do so. Rather than creating an entire post from scratch, you might want to start off by writing "link wrap" posts that describe something you've read elsewhere online, quote a small section of that text, and point out why you think it's interesting. You'll also want to make sure you link to the source. The value you add in doing this is two-fold. Firstly, you're introducing your audience to content you think they might be interested in and, secondly, by summarising or pointing to interesting sections of that content, you're editorialising that link. The person or organisation who created the content originally will also benefit because users will click through to view the source. Also, because the algorythm used by google and other search sites often gives pages with more links greater authority, your link directly impacts the findability of that page for people who search for it later.

Most blogs allow users to comment on posts. There are pros and cons to the different methods of comment moderation. I'm not a solicitor, but have published a post elsewhere introducing some of the issues. If you do allow comments, you might want to create and publish details of your moderation policy, including your rules, so that users know exactly what's expected of them.

A lot of bloggers talk about the importance of joining the conversation. You can do this by using the comments that come into your blog as points of discussion in subsequent posts. You may also want to post comments on posts on other blogs, particularly if you link to and discuss those posts. There's no reason why you shouldn't include a link to your own post, so long as it's relevant, in your comments elsewhere but do make sure you're linking to something that genuinely adds to the conversation rather than spamming the blog with irrelevant, and probably unwanted, links in a bid just to get some traffic.

Another way of participating in the conversation is to link prolifically from your own posts as a way of illustrating points and to alert the bloggers who created the content you link to of the existence of your posts. Because you'll want to stay abreast of the conversation - the linking, quoting, and commenting across a number of topical blogs - you'll need to use tools such as an RSS reader, which will be discussed in my next post here, and "buzz tracking" tools such as technorati to find and keep track of what people are saying within your niche and about your posts.

Technorati is a blog search tools. It usually picks up new posts faster than google or other traditional search engines because most blog platforms send technorati a notification, called a "ping", each time an update is made. Technorati is useful for finding, based on keyword searches, blogs and posts about specific topics but the reason it's used by most serious bloggers is because, if you input the URL of your blog, you can instantly see all the blog posts that link to your blog. Armed with this knowledge, you can go out and see what others have posted, and participate in the conversation your blog is part of wherever it's taking place.

When you create a blog post, you'll usually want to give it a title, create the body of the post, and then categorise or tag it so that readers can more easily find what they are looking for. When you name your blog and title your posts, as well as when you use categories and tags, you'll want to think very carefully about the words you use, and ensure that they are terms people are likely to search for. One of my blogs, about St. Albans where I live, actually appears higher in the google results for St. Albans than one of the two local newspapers, precisely because I've used St. Albans in the name of the blog, in the title of most posts, and in each of the categories I use. It also helps that I link out to all the other St. Albans based bloggers I could find and many of them have reciprocated with links back to me, again reinforcing within the google algorythm the understanding that my blog is not only about St. Albans but is highly regarded as a source of good information by other websites.

Actually using the blogging tool you choose is the easy part. Find a blogging platform you like and play around a bit, learning to use the various options and tools, before you start heavily promoting it. You're bound to make a few mistakes early on, but get your technique right and you'll be 3/4 of the way towards successful blogging.

This post is part of a series of guests post I'm making here to introduce some of the social media tools and techniques people and organisations can use to inform and connect with audiences and stakeholders. In my next post, I'll discuss using RSS to help find and keep track of intersting content that you can quote from, link to, and build upon.

Part Eight: Using RSS to Keep Track of the Conversation

If you are interested in regularly consuming content from a particular website, or want keep track of keyword searches without having to input them time and time again, the topic of my guest post this week, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), may very well be of interest to you.

Most people view web based content through a browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer. If readers don't want to miss newly published content, they have to remember to frequently check each site they want to follow. Sometimes there is new content, other times there isn't - a colleague of mine likens it to chickens walking around in circles pecking at whatever is on the ground in front of them, an analogy he makes to point out that this is almost certainly not the most efficient or affective way of finding, keeping track of and consuming new content.

A more efficient way is to put yourself at the centre of the flow of information by subscribing to RSS feeds, sometimes called "web feeds", of the websites and other content sources you're interested in monitoring. An RSS feed looks like a stripped down version of a website - the design and formatting isn't normally visible in the feed, only the text, images and other content elements. As an example, here's what the RSS feed (will open in a new window) for this, the Big Green Challenge Blog, looks like.

RSS Button

Many times, where content is available as an RSS feed, a distinctive orange button (as seen to left) can be found on the page. Other times, an RSS logo appears next to the URL in the address bar at the top of a browser.

Subscribing to an RSS feed is like ordering a subscription to a magazine or newspaper although, in the case of RSS, it's nearly always free. Everytime new content is published, a copy is sent out to all subscribers, meaning those with a subscription needn't ever miss anything.

In order to subscribe to an RSS feed, you'll first need to sign up for an RSS reader. The two web based readers I'm most familiar with, Bloglines and Google Reader, are both free and easy to use.

To subscribe to an RSS feed, users can click on the RSS button found on a page or in their browser's address window, which should open a new page showing the address of the RSS feed to be subscribed to and, often, a pull down menu of different RSS readers so that the subscription can be made with just one click. The other way to subscribe to an RSS feed is to copy the URL of the page or feed you want to subscribe to and paste it into the "add feed" form within your chosen RSS reader.

Once subscribed to a feed, each time there is new content it will appear in your reader. Most readers also allow users to mark content as read or unread, to share content with others, and to bookmark any content they might want to return to later.

It's not just content sites that offer RSS feeds - many social media and search sites also do. So, for example, if you're interested in getting an alert every time a user on twitter mentions the name of your organisation, you simply input that search once and subscribe to the feed. You can also subscribe to feeds from, to mention just a few, flickr tags and technorati blog searches - meaning that everytime posts a photo or blog post about the topic you've defined in your original search, you're alerted to that content.

If you'd like to learn more about RSS, there's an excellent, easy to follow video on the Common Craft Show that's well worth viewing.

RSS isn't just useful for subscribing to web feeds, it's also the delivery mechanism used by many social tools and social networks to share content. So, for example, when I author a blog post on one of my own blogs, it uses RSS to alert a service called twitterfeed that I've done so. Twitterfeed then fires out a twitter tweet with the title and link of that post. The RSS feed of my blog also feeds into facebook and linked-in so that my contacts on those services can see what I've written. I also used to use another service, talkr, which took my RSS feed and created a computer generated audio file of the content. This made it possible for me to offer a podcast of my blog on Apple's iTunes Store without ever having to actually record a thing myself.

It's also possible to aggregate and remix RSS feeds using services such as xfruits and Yahoo Pipes to create custom feeds of content, for example all news stories from ten different UK based news sources which mention "Big Green Challenge" or any other keyword you define.

RSS is a really powerful tool in that it helps users to better organise the flow of content around them and, for those creating content, offers an extremely flexible stream of content for use by other people and services.

Why mention it here, in a series of guest posts about social media? Because not only do most blogs and social tools offer RSS output, it's also - in my books at least - an indispensible tool for helping bloggers to keep track of the conversations their contributions are part of. Finding, subscribing and reading what others are saying is the first step towards making successful contributions yourself. Quoting and linking to that content is the next step and, once you've gained confidence and understanding, you can begin to add value by contextualising those quotes and links, or voicing an opinion about them. Joining into an already active conversation by listening and contributing, at least initially,  with gestures such as a smile or nod is, in most instances, far more socially acceptable than bursting into the conversation by interrupting with strong views of your own. And this is exactly how you can use RSS - to listen, to inform yourself, to help you keep track of the views and contributions of others, to provide material to link to and to, later, contextualise or comment upon.

This is the eighth post in a series I've been publishing here on the Big Green Challenge Blog. Other posts have looked at a range of social tools and techniques for telling stories, finding new audiences and engaging with stakeholders. You'll find an index on last week's post, which provided an indepth guide to blogging.

new ruling - us bloggers to disclose paid endorsements

The Washington Post reports that the US Federal Trade Commission has issued new rules requiring bloggers to disclose that they've been paid to write a review or endorse a product:

"Bloggers who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday...

..."The revised guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement," the FTC said in a release. "Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service."

The new rules bring the US more into line with the EU where the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2007) has required similar transparency from bloggers and has effectively banned "astro-turfing".

london the social media capital of the world? my thoughts in the telegraph

London is, suggests an article by the Telegraph's Emma Barnett, the social media capital of the World. Here's her evidence:

• 10% of traffic to Digg, the link recommendation service, comes from London

• London is the largest geographical network on Facebook

• Twitter has revealed that London is it's top city in terms of usage

Some twitter users, such as Newcastle based Stephen Davies (@stedavies), have argued that, although they aren't based in London themselves, their ISP is, which fools websites into thinking that the user is in London. If widespread, this could certainly skew the statistics. Likewise, it's easy to believe that many people who are members of the London network on Facebook are people who have visited, or aspire to live here rather than those actually based in London. I, for one, live in St. Albans, just outside London, and haven't joined either network. Again, I'm certain many are under or over counted for similar reasons.

Regardless of statistical certainty, it is true that many people in London use social networking services and other social sites. Emma Barnett asked me why - here's what I said:

"Londoners are well known for maintaining a polite distance in their dealings with each other. Whilst this makes it easier to navigate a city of 7.5 million - imagine having to say hello and making chit-chat with everyone you encounter on the tube - it's also somewhat dehumanising.

"I'm not at all surprised that Londoners are taking advantage of social networking because it gives them the opportunity to do what people in smaller cities and towns often take for granted - have random conversations with strangers without worrying too much about overstepping personal boundaries."

However, Mr Hamman also thinks the truth of the matter might just be: "London has a comparatively young, affluent and office based workforce with high levels of internet connectivity. That, combined with its status as a global communications, business and social hub, means that its population is more likely than those of similar sized cities to participate in social networking activities."

measuring the roi of social media... or not

This week I've had the pleasure of lecturing on the Master in Digital Marketing course at the IE Business School, which offers the #3 ranked MBA course in the World according to Forbes. It's a daunting task - these people know their business, and are already far more knowledgeable about social media than most people I've presented to or taught in the past. Which is why I need your help.

In session one, we did an indepth exploration of the theory behind, and practice of, social media both consumer/audience facing and inside the organisation (eg. "Enterprise 2.0"). In the second session I showed them - some of them already knew how to do much of this - how to use the whole web as their canvas.

But, as you'd expect from a top notch group of students, they rose up in unison at the end, and asked me to come up with real hard data on the ROI of social media. Now everyone in the social media industry knows that there are plenty of vendors, service providers and social media gurus who claim to know the answer, yet I get the feeling that most of these "infuencer metrics" and long tail curves just aren't going to cut it with this audience. And they shouldn't.

But there is growing evidence that, although social media spend is said to be growing, few of those spending the dosh have worked out a way to measure the ROI. Indeed, a study - and I don't put a huge amount of faith in the results of a single study, but it is noteworthy regardless - suggested as few as 14% of professionals across a range of industries claim to measure ROI for their social media activities.

For as long as I can remember, the main benefits of hosting a community on a site, or otherwise engaging via social media, have been to:

• increase brand loyalty and affinity
• increase the number of opportunities to sell to consumers (by increasing repeat visits)
• get users involved in creating fresh, new content on the site
• learn more about users - primarily demographics, but also observing behaviour
• in a few instances, it's also about crowd-sourcing customer service and/or innovating new ideas for service delivery and products
• reach out to new audiences, and better serve captive ones

Inside the enterprise, it's all about making efficiency savings by bubbling content and knowledge to the top, increasing connections between staff, and supporting useful behaviours such as group collaboration, sharing, etc.

I have over simplified, of course, but those are the main things I hear the industry saying.

Now don't get me wrong - I very strongly believe that all of these things are worthwhile. Social media can help organisations reach out to new audiences, embrace existing ones, and there's nothing at all wrong with being more open, honest and transparent no matter what business your in. And within the enterprise, I hate nothing more than beareaucratic structures that stifle, rather than assist, people who hold the knowledge, creativity and skills that a business needs to thrive.

However, when it comes to actual, concrete metrics, there are little. Social media doesn't always increase sales by x percent. Enterprise collaboration systems aren't necessarily responsible for a x percent reduction in cost base.

It might be because we're trying to measure something that can't easily be measured. It's taken for granted that word of mouth advertising is the most effective marketing tool, yet we don't, as far as I'm aware, have a way to measure it. And on the Enterprise side, we can't measure the value, or savings, of two employees dreaming up a creative solution or new product during a fag break. Probably because, in most instances, there is no cost involved in implementing it - it just happens.

But that's a tough argument to make with shit hot marketing students who are used to measuring the effectiveness of campaigns and other activities.

Which leaves me - and our whole industry - in an awkward position: 

Plan A: I can either go back to them tomorrow and tell them that, actually, it wasn't their wonderful £3 million campaign that increased sales by 20% year on year, or their new management structure that led to greater effectiveness and efficiences, it was the fact that it was sunny outside, interest rates were low, and people just generally felt happy in themselves. Implying, basically, that you simply can't measure this sort of thing effectively.

Plan B: I come up with some compelling evidence, both anecdotal and hard quantitative data, to prop up our argument - one I strongly believe in - that social media, and enterprise social media, not only genuinely make an impact, but that its ROI can be measured.

So I need your help. Help me come up with a strong, evidence based argument(s) for either Plan A or Plan B - by 15.00 London time (BST) Friday or I'm toast. In return for your efforts and insights, I'll post the results of this research, as well as output from the discussion, right here.

brits in sxwx panel proposing frenzy

Today is the final day of public voting to decide which panels will appear at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference and competition is fierce, with at least one panel targeting people with facebook ads.

Last year, according to Sam Michel at ChinWag, there were 18 British entries. This year there are 60.

So what are the Brits hoping to talk about? I took all the list of panels from Sam's post, stripped out everything but the titles, and dumped the list into wordle to get this:

excellent presentation provides intro and insight re: social media

Marta Kagan has published a "one year on" update to her hugely popular slide presentation, What the F**K is Social Media. It's as good an explanation as you're likely to find anywhere:

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Link hat-tip to Julie-Laure Coassin