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Blogging and Social Media

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

exploiting the technology and protecting the enterprise

This is a guide to blogging and social media with a difference. It’s aimed at professionals in business who might not have thought of using such communication techniques before. In fact it’s written by people with a background in law – which doesn’t at first seem like a zappy, media-conscious line of work to be in. But the first half of the book explains how blogs work; it outlines the plusses and minuses of blogging; shows you how to set up your own blog; and how to write and run it. The advice is clear and realistic.

Blogging and Social MediaYou’ve got to be prepared to work at it; success doesn’t come easily; you can make money, but don’t expect too much; and if you’re in a serious business, take care what you say in your postings. It strikes a good balance between enthusiasm and the need for clear-headed guidance. The advantages for the business user are potentially enormous – because if you’re writing about something you already know well, blogging is fairly easy. It’s free, and you can write new material whenever you feel like it. There’s a tremendous potential for niche markets: if you are an expert in second-hand motor parts, the migration of birds in Europe, or planning application procedures for new motorways – you can be number one in your field without problems.

Even if you are constrained to write about your firm’s business in waste management you have the chance to link up with others in the same field. You can create networks, develop banks of resources, post bulletins, capture the contract opportunities in your area, and make a name for yourself and your firm.

You’ll be doing this even though you are only dealing with issues you would be handling normally – with the difference that you are doing it as part of a social network. And that’s the essence of what this book has to offer: it is showing you how to link up with other people who share your interests.

After blogging come the variety of social media which have mushroomed in the last few years. There are services such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter which started out as networking sites for teenagers but developed very rapidly into large scale communication tools. Each of these seems to have developed its own special audience. MySpace for instance is the premier site for musicians who upload recordings and promotional videos for their performances. Twitter on the other hand has been embraced by media organisations such as the BBC and The Guardian – even though messages posted to the site are limited to 140 characters (like a text message). Similar opportunities exist at uploading sites such as YouTube and Flickr.

They then cover the new generation of online office applications. These are word processors, spreadsheets, databases, and accounting software – such as Google Docs and Zoho.com – which don’t run on your own machine but which you access (free of charge) via the Web. These have the immense advantage that you don’t have to pay for upgrades to the latest version.

There’s also an excellent chapter on podcasts, giving instructions on how to make them and examples of how they might be useful in business. And once again, full details are given of all the free software you might need.

They then go deeper into the details of how companies might use these services internally – using what has come to known as an Enterprise 2.0 approach. Finally, and understandably since the authors all come from a legal background, they outline the law as it relates to the use of social media, covering copyright, trade marks, passing off, and brand names, defamation, privacy, and data protection. A number of complex cases have arisen as a result of bloggers writing about their bosses and the companies they work for. It’s a risky business – so beware!

© Roy Johnson 2008

Blogging and Social Media   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Blogging and Social Media   Buy the book at Amazon US


Alex Newson et al, Blogging and Other Social Media, London: Gower, 2008, pp.182, ISBN: 0566087898


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Media Tagged With: Blogging, Blogging and Other Social Media, Communication, eCommerce, Social media, Technology

Enterprise 2.0

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how social media will change the future of work

The title of this book combines two coded terms – Web 2.0 and ‘The Enterprise’ – for which read social media software’ and Big Business. And the purpose is to show how the techniques and concepts behind Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, tagging, RSS, and social bookmarking) can be used to encourage collaboration efforts in what was previously thought of as secretive, competitive businesses.

social mediaIt’s an argument which is fast becoming quite familiar. To succeed in modern business, managers and directors must learn to listen and talk to their customers and staff. They need to be more agile in their thinking, less monolithic in their practices, and they need to catch up to new Internet-based activities which can sweep away unwary traditionalists overnight [look what happened to Encyclopedia Britannica] and create multi-billion pound enterprises almost as quickly [Amazon, Google].

Niall Cook realises that there will be problems and resistance to such suggestions from within orthodox business communities. But he also points to their existing weaknesses.

Companies spend millions of dollars installing information and knowledge management systems, yet still struggle with the most basic challenges of persuading their employees to use them.

Will it be difficult to persuade large organisations to adopt these very democratic tools? He offers case studies from companies such as the BBC, IBM, Microsoft, and BUPA and others to show that it might. He even makes a case for the use of instant messaging and social presence software (MSN and Twitter).

He also has an example of the US Defence Intelligence Agency using mashups to provide simultaneous streams of information through a single interface (because that’s what its users want), and a multinational software company using Facebook as an alternative to its own Intranet (because its employees use it more).

He gives a very convincing example of the creation of a wiki running alongside the company Intranet in a German bank. The IT staff started using the wiki to generate documentation, and within six months use of the Intranet was down 50%, email was down 75%, and meeting times had been cut in half.

In fact he misses the opportunity to point out that one of the biggest incentives for companies to embrace Web 2.0 software is that much of it is completely free. Almost all major programs are now available in Open Source versions – including such fundamentals as operating systems (Linux) content management systems (Joomla) and virtual learning environments (Moodle).

In the UK, government institutions have invested and wasted billions of pounds after being bamboozled by software vendors. In the education sector alone, VLEs such as Blackboard and WebCT have proved costly mistakes for many colleges and universities. They are now locked in to proprietary systems, whilst OSS programs such as Moodle run rings round them – and are free.

Is the embracing of social software solutions likely to take place any time soon? Well, Cook has some interesting answers. His argument is that these developments are already taking place. Smart companies will catch on, and obstructors will fall behind with no competitive edge.

Bear in mind that within just five years, members of the MySpace generation are going to be entering the workforce, bringing their collaborative tools with them. If you don’t have the software that allows them to search, link, author, tag, mashup, and subscribe to business information in the ways they want to, they are going to do one of three things: use third party software that does; leave to join a competitor that does; not want to work for you in the first place.

Even the software solutions in this radical, indeed revolutionary development, must be fast, light, and quick to implement.

Speed and flexibility. Oracle’s IdeaFactory took just a few days to build. Janssen-Cilag’s wiki-based Intranet was purchased, customised, and launched within two weeks.

This is all part of what Peter Merholz in his recent Subject to Change calls agile technology. Cook provides strategies for those who wish to implement these ideas within their own company – and it has to be said that he assumes a certain degree of subversiveness might be necessary.

The book ends with a review of the literature on social software and a comprehensive bibliography – so anyone who wants to pursue these matters at a theoretical level has all the tools to do so. But I suspect that anybody who is taken with these new ideas – if they have any blood in their veins – will immediately want to go away and put them into practice.

This is a truly inspirational book which should be required reading for managers, IT leaders, systems analysts, developers, and business strategists in any enterprise, small, medium, and especially large. I can think of two organisations I am working with right now (one a university, the other a large city college) who ought to be implementing these ideas but who are doing just the contrary – stifling innovation. One, following its culture of ‘no change’ has just been swallowed up by its rival. The other is running onto the financial rocks precisely because it refuses to learn from its users and its own staff – whilst claiming to do just the opposite.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Enterprise 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Enterprise 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon US


Niall Cook, Enterprise 2.0: how social software will change the future of work, London: Gower, 2008, pp.164, ISBN: 0566088002


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: e-Commerce, Enterprise, Media, Social media, Technology

Flickr Hacks

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tips and tools for sharing photos online

Photo blogging is one of the most expansive parts of the Internet and online media just at the moment. You take a picture with your digital camera or your mobile phone, and blog it straight onto a public site. Flickr is owned by Yahoo! They allow you to upload your photos into a web space, and you are given 20MB per month, which is quite generous. Instead of keeping your snaps just for yourself and family members on your hard disk, you can store them, share them with the world, tag them, and make them available for worldwide consumption. You can even make money out of them if you play your cards right.

Flickr HacksAlthough your photos are in the public domain, you can control who is allowed to see them. There are full instructions here for setting your privacy options. Tagging and meta-data are fully explained (that’s giving titles, categories, and links to your photos) and there are also tips on resizing photos to save on your allotted storage space.

When extra information in the form of meta-tags is added to the images, all sorts of new possibilities are created. Paul Bausch shows games involving comparisons with similarly tagged photos, and he demonstrates how geo-tagged images can be mapped.

With so many of these images being viewed and viewed across the web, it’s good that he also explains issues of copyright and licensing, including the relatively new Creative Commons licences.

He also show how you can subscribe to a news feed which will notify you when other people upload new images. Then the later part of the book offers some fairly simple scripts for constructing screensavers, tracking your friends’ favourites, and even plotting your personal contacts using Google Maps.

Assuming you eventually end up with a large collection of photos, the next more advanced level shows you how to back up the collection, then how to store and sort them.

Finally, for those who might wish to interact with Flickr and operate at an administrator level, there are some advanced scripts which allow you to act as a moderator, create custom mosaics and collages, and mash up your photos to produce all sorts of special effects.

© Roy Johnson 2006

Flickr Hacks   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Flickr Hacks   Buy the book at Amazon US


Paul Bausch, Flickr Hacks, Sebastopol: CA, O’Reilly, 2006, pp.335, ISBN: 0596102453


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Filed Under: Media, Technology Tagged With: Flickr, Media, Social media, Technology

The FaceBook Marketing Book

March 21, 2011 by Roy Johnson

using social media for eCommerce

FaceBook is both a media sensation and a mixed blessing. It has 500 million active users and half that number are thought to use the service every day. But some have found themselves out of a job or refused an interview when an employer checked through their unfettered postings or found ‘inappropriate’ photos in somebody’s albumns. It was originally a meet-up bulletin board system for college students, but like so many social media software programs it has outgrown its original purpose to become a major multi-purpose communication platform in its own right. The two authors of this guide are such enthusiasts for FaceBook that they argue it can be used as an effective marketing tool – and this is their quick guide which explains how to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.

FaceBook First of all they show you how to set up a account profile, and what the various configuration details mean in terms of advantages and potential dangers. (Some people have courted problems and even physical attack by revealing their full postal address for instance.) Fortunately, it’s possible to fine tune your privacy settings to control who sees what – but this requires time, effort, and a fine sense of discrimination in knowing which one setting might over-ride another. All of these wrinkles are fully explained.

After the basics of creating a profile they move onto something I would guess nine out of every ten FaceBook users don’t even realise exists – a ‘Page’. This is something that gives you the opportunity to display a product, service, or brand that you wish to promote. This is where marketing starts to get serious. And it’s followed by the even more powerful feature of FaceBook groups, which allow you to set up a topic or an activity for discussion among interested parties. These can be used to include mention of your own products or services – but the authors underscore the warning that this can easily be perceived as spamming, and even lead in extreme cases to being banned from FaceBook because it contravenes their conditions of service.

This is also true of the next major feature they discuss – FaceBook events which can be used when you wish to invite users to the launch of a new product, a movie or theatre opening, or even a birthday celebration. [This feature has also been used recently for the far more serious business of mobilising supporters in the Middle Eastern uprisings.]

FaceBook also has its own system of applications (apps) – small programs that can make your efforts more powerful or wide-reaching. Moreover it also gives you the wherewithal to design your own if you come up with a new idea for promotion or engagement. They also show you how to customise your pages, how to use the share and like buttons to good effect, and how to write content that is likely to be shared by your visitors and followers.

By the time you reach the section on managing promotional campaigns and analysing the results, you’ll see that it’s obvious FaceBook (rather like WordPress) has gone from a piece of social media software to a full scale platform which offers all the tools and possibilities of a commercial web site.

They make is all seem very easy and almost automatically successful – by repeatedly mentioning large figures (250 million viewers) and big brands (Starbucks, IBM, Coca-Cola) they give the impression that you can market your local dog shampoo service just as successfully. And maybe you can. After all, the whole thing is completely free, and success for you might be not millions of ‘friends’ but simply a buck shee advert that draws in a few more dog washes a week. You’ve got nothing to lose.

FaceBook Marketing Book   Buy the book at Amazon UK

FaceBook Marketing Book   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Dan and Alison Zarrella, The FaceBook Marketing Book, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2010, pp.272, ISBN: 1449388485


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: eCommerce, Facebook, Social media

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