Punch Above Your Weight is a 1 day workshop designed to help you beef up your Internet presence to make you look bigger and more impressive.
Presented by the Punch Above Team, who have interviewed over 20 small businesses who are have successfully used Web 2.0 technologies to raise their online presence. The workshop combines their insights with the team’s own experience of online marketing.
The next workshop will be held on 11th July at the Hub, 5 Wormwood St, London and at the Hurtwood Inn, Peaslake near Guildford on 31st July.
There’s a theoretical session in the morning and a hands on session in the afternoon. The price for both sessions is £135 + VAT- book here
I’ve been following Gary Vaynerchuk’s blog for some time. Gary’s enthusiasm for Social Media and meeting new people is amazing.
Gary’s business is wine and he has successfully added elements of Web 2.0 to spread the message of his Winelibrary.tv blog.
In the video above, Gary asks (25 seconds in), When do you know when you have a community?
This is an interesting question. Many people who are embracing social media today are obsessed with raw numbers, in others words:
Who is following me on Facebook? How many Twitter followers do I have? How many people are subscribed to my RSS feed?
My concern here is that in the rush to build a community of people around your brand. The content of your message could be lost. In other words, don’t lose sight of your message, the numbers following you will take care of themselves. Concentrate on engaging your audience and NEVER take them for granted.
In answer to Gary’s question, you have a community when ONE person listens to you. Gary’s top tips include:
Embrace your community BIG or SMALL
Stop worrying about stats and numbers
Stop taking for granted that you already have a community, it starts at 1!
A wee bit late, but then I have no broadband access at home at the moment, eek.
Fuel, is a new brand of conference from the Carsonified team. The conference is aimed at entrepreneurs and marketers who want to learn about and use social media tools. The speakers were varied and represented a good spectrum of start-ups, corporate business and those heavily involved within the social media space.
Highlight presentations for me were from:
Alex Hunter, head of Virgin’s online properties. Alex discussed how Virgin America launched an airline, embraced the power of social media tools and a community. A great case study on how Virgin launched a company WITHOUT the help of Branson.
Ted Hunt from Innocent Drinks discussing how Innocent capitalised on their “inner voice” and used Social Media to build their online brand. Innocent manage to brilliantly inject personality into their brand.
Overall, a great conference with some brilliant demos of Microsoft DeepZoom and Photosynth
Take a look at the Virgin Eye, as mentioned by Alex Hunter at Fuel. The Virgin Eye scans the Internet looking for news, pictures and stories from the Virgin Empire.
The Virgin Group are taking Social Media technologies VERY seriously.
Tomorrow, I will be attending Carsonified’s Fuel conference at RIBA. Expect lots of Twitter updates (Follow Me). Post conference reactions and write up will follow here soon!
I’m particularly looking forward to hearing Tara Hunt’s and Ted Hunt’s (no relation, I think?) talks.
I came across Twistori tonight. The site is a "first person" visualization of Twitter messages, inspired by We Feel Fine. Twitter messages are filtered by occurrences of the phrases "I love", "I hate", "I think", "I believe", "I feel" & "I wish", which are placed in a visual scrolling message ticker, similar to Digg Labs BigSpy.
The site is a great aggregator for human emotions on Twitter.
“Web 2.0 is not about mass marketing. It’s about actually understanding the masses. And it’s not about controlling the message. It’s about engaging the audience and actually hearing what they have to say. It’s about enabling creativity, realizing a culture of contribution, and putting the user in control”.
Web 2.0 Heroes by Bradley Jones presents a series of edited interviews from a number of leading figures from within the Web 2.0 sphere (See below). In most cases the interviewee is a person closely related to the company’s web strategy. The book builds on the Web 2.0 theme and asks. “What’s is coming next?”. A few of the interviewees discuss their thoughts on the Semantic Web and reflect on developing areas such as Software plus Services (S+S).
Overall, the book presents a good perspective and is just over 250 pages. I did enjoy the large number of quotes which are highlighted throughout the book. However, I would have liked to have seen some insights from the author, adding to the commentary of the interviewees. Bradley’s voice is somewhat missing! Nevertheless, an interesting read for anyone with an interest in the Web 2.0 sphere.
A great video from Mahalo Daily, condensing this year’s WWDC 2008 keynote. Personally, I’m quite interested in Mobile Me, which Apple promotes as “Exchange for the rest of us”. A nice idea but how will it work in practice?
Today the Thinking Digital conference kicked off at The Sage in Gateshead. This is my first visit to the conference and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The audience is made up of mainly ‘suits’, journalists, media people, as well as academics from various universities from the UK. I’m not really sure whether the suits were really grasping many of the points that were discussed. Nevertheless, I found the speaker presentations to be very good. My synopsis follows below.
The morning sessions focused on the Future of Media. Matt Locke discussed all of the exciting work he and his team are doing at Channel 4. Matt is the commissioning editor of the education team. I’ve heard a lot about Matt over the last year. But this was the first time I’ve actually heard him speak. I was very impressed. Matt is ‘switched on’ to the social media world in a big way. He discussed how his team had been researching, what he termed the ‘six spaces’ for communication and interaction. The talk addressed the challenges in working out the etiquettes for communication in these spaces:
Next, Eric Lindstrom discussed how video content is now being brought to market using ‘multi channels’. Eric had a great quote, “The new baby of the internet is entertainment…”. We were also shown a hilarious video which you can see below. What happens, when Facebook meets the real world? Be afraid…
The next speaker was Jeremy Silver, and his presentation focused on the music industry. In particular, how this music industry is evolving and the new opportunities which have arisen in areas such as discovering new talent, music consumption, music discovery and music review.
In the afternoon session, “United we stand”, Darren Thwaites described how his newspaper, The Evening Gazette, had embraced social media with “hyper local citizen journalism” with amazing results. I was particularly impressed with how “community bloggers” were writing stories in their local areas and posting them on the gazette blog site. The Evening Gazette’s move into social media interestingly did not cannibalise the sales of the traditional paper copy. In fact, paper distribution increased as a result of the move to social media, very cool.
The next speaker was Ian Kennedy from Cisco, who described some of the innovative ways Cisco is helping teams to collaborate in distributed global environments. This included an incredible video of ‘telepresence’ – two people apparently on stage together. However, one person was in Bangalore, the other in California. Gosh, Star Trek becomes reality!
The delightful Tara Hunt, [Miss Rogue] ended the morning session with a passionate account of the “Bar Camp” concept and other innovative collaborative techniques. Tara is an amazing, lively and energetic speaker. She’s also a very groovy chick. I can’t express her passion for Bar Camp in words. So, watch the video below!
“We the geeks hereby declare that we have the means to do it ourselves, so from this point forward we are not employee 95362 or 43671. We are talented and sought after individuals who can and will find the means to break free of your cubicles and ivory towers. We don’t give a damn if you have the attention of 10 billion sticky eyeballs. We don’t give a shit about sticky eyeballs. We give a shit about people. We are independent, empowered, and en-fucking-gaged.” Rock on!
I should really should get involved in this stuff! Seriously. Bar Camps plant the seeds for changing the world….forever
I recorded the demo on Steve’s camera, so hopefully it will be uploaded into the cloud soon. In the meantime, check out Ian Forrester’s video below. Steve is a greater speaker and I don’t know how much Microsoft are paying him. But Mr Neil Holloway sir, please pay him more!
Finally, a presentation made by Jonathan Harris made me stop, think and took my breath away. Yep, I had a Scoble moment. Jonathan’s awesome work made me cry with tears of wonderment and joy.
Thanks to my pal, Steve Clayton I’m off to Newcastle this week to attend the Thinking Digital conference. This is my first conference of the year and I’m really looking forward to it.
The event takes on an eclectic range of technology-based topics that have (or soon will have) a profound effect upon the way we work and live: from the future of media and making far better use of technology, to our obsession with happiness and creating a cure for ageing.
The speaker line up is fantastic, highlight guest speakers include:
Doug Richard , formerly of The Dragons’ Den on BBC2 and founder of Library House. Doug is also the Chairman and CEO of Trutap, a great new startup in London.
Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist & author of The Singularity is Near
Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s Software + Services Lead and self confessed “Geek in Disguise. I’m looking forward to seeing the first live public demos of Microsoft’s Live Mesh.
Tara Hunt, founder of Citizen Agency, San Francisco.
If you are attending the conference, ping me an mail and let’s meet up? jas {at] thewebpitch {dot} {com}
