We are co-organising Trydan social media cafe this Friday in Juno Lounge, Wellfield Road, Cardiff from 11AM till 2PM.
If you’re interested in social media, there’s more info on the Trydan event wiki. If you’re planning to attend, please add your details to the list.
If you’re from elsewhere, we’re also maintaining a list of social media cafes around the UK.
Seth Godin tries to answer the question “is marketing evil?“.
Check out this intriguing post Why Every Company Is A Media Company (from Mashable blog) about a small restaurant which dominates at least one Google search query – by having a website with some interesting, relevant, “human” content.
If you’re using businessy or corporate speak on your site, it’s a good opportunity to reconsider. People are mostly immune to that. People like real voices!
[ UPDATE 06/02/09: Comments have been enabled on Alastair Campbell's site, albeit in an unusual place. At the moment it's unclear whether they apply to the whole site or each individual post. Nevertheless, you can disregard some of my criticism below as Campbell is also responding personally. He explains that the original lack of comments was down to "first day teething troubles". ]
Alastair Campbell has somewhat belatedly launched his own text blog and video blog.
For someone so strongly linked with political communications in the UK, he’s a little late to the game. But I for one am a little intrigued about how he will choose to use it.
He’s also on Twitter now as @campbellclaret – presumably a reference to his chosen football team, Burnley.
First impressions? He talks about having discussions, but there is no comment facility on the blog. Why do high profile bloggers shy from this? People will talk about you, so you might as well encourage and “own” some of the discussion. A busy comments area brings people back, especially if there’s controversy. And Campbell is not unfamiliar with that.
He’d even retain the power to moderate comments, which is again something at which he’s had plenty of practice.
Otherwise they’ll use a system like Diigo to maintain annotations about your site elsewhere, as we saw with Whitehouse.gov recently.
Incidentally, call me picky but the convention is that the whole thing is referred to as a “blog” and one article is referred to as a “blog post”.
There’s also a video blog and the first entry (I mean post) is a very slickly-edited piece with some footage from the glory years with Tony Blair and the upbeat sounds of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” on the soundtrack (I wonder if they sought permission for this).
It’s entertaining.
I generally think people’s expectations of online video have lowered these days. Just shoot a quick and frank piece to camera from your living room – it’s cheap, it’s immediate and it feels more open and honest. With such high production values from the outset, I’ll be surprised if he can sustain this regularly.
Silicon Alley Insider has a provocative piece about New York Times exploring a paid subscriptions scheme for its online service.
I’ll keep this brief. I just want to stoke up some of the issues around this.
These are the potential problems, as I see them, with this scheme:
As ever, comments are open.
Here’s an introduction to Spotify from my personal blog.
There are plenty of people saying this music streaming service is amazing, they’re all correct and you can read their writings. So I tried to give the blog post a record label perspective, as that’s my background and my distinctive.
Cover what you do best and link to the rest!
Ryanair’s Cheap Shot – I’m Not Taking The Bait…
There’s lots of blog bustle about this Ryanair story. (In summary, a blogger wrote about a minor glitch he’d experienced in Ryanair’s online ticket booking system. Ryanair employees responded in his blog comments calling him an “idiot and a liar” and berating his choice of the WordPress blogging platform. Ryanair compound the fury by releasing an official statement saying “It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers…”).
Customer service now happens on a stage… Customers are networked. I’ve visited these themes before, with Chrysler and Ford. Read the seminal and prophetic book Cluetrain Manifesto for more of this wonderful stuff.
But rather than take the bait, I think this is completely in keeping with Ryanair’s PR policy and possibly everything they’ve done before this point.
This may well fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category. Undoubtedly, it’s a cheap shot response – in keeping with the airline’s established reputation for cheapness.
(As a staunch advocate of WordPress, I’m sure they can only be kidding…)
After the blog post, Travolution covered this and later Guardian, Telegraph, The Times and other news outlets. What’s the value of all that exposure – in exchange for some blog comments and a quick statement?
While I’m on it, did you know Ryanair don’t hire outside agencies for their advertising?
The Times had a feature about Ryanair’s advertising in December 2004, containing this gem from Paul Fitzsimmons, their then head of communications:
Then later:
So why should their online PR be any different? Talk about an integrated communications policy! It’s risky, for sure. For fans of the Cluetrain Manifesto, it certainly corresponds to the “authentic human voice”. But I can imagine it backfiring if their amiable tomfoolery does not translate across countries. For instance, now that CNN have covered it, will USA and other international readers appreciate the jokes?