currybetdotnet Social media archive
"We should have hung them when they were ten. Killing children is wrong" - Retweeting without verification
Yesterday I tweeted a comment I'd noticed on the Daily Mail website underneath an article about Jon Venables: Best ever user comment in the Mail? "We should have hung them when they were ten. Killing children is wrong" http://bit.ly/cTnFrE Whether the original comment was intentionally funny or not, my message got retweeted quite a bit, and I noticed something curious about the way it was distributed. A lot of the retweets missed off the link to the source. People echoed...
Balloons at Depeche Mode's O2 gig illustrate the difference between 'community' and 'fans'
My colleague Meg Pickard gives a great presentation about the nature of social media, and it includes a slide of three people waiting at a bus stop, with the question 'is this a community?'. At the weekend I had cause to think about the nature of being 'in a community' at Depeche Mode's O2 gig. There is no doubt that I am a big fan of Depeche, and have been for many, many years. I also visit a lot of...
The flawed French Facebook & Twitter experiment - social media is a conversation, not a newswire
The curious experiment by five French journalists to hide in a remote location and only use Facebook and Twitter as their news sources ignores the fact that social media is a conversation with friends - and conversations with friends are generally pretty good at conveying the news you need to know.
Notes and take-away quotes: "Social media for competitive intelligence" by Marydee Ojala
An overview of Marydee Ojala's excellent presentation at the 2009 Online Information exhibition, addressing how to use social media tools to gather competitive intelligence.
Real-time web provides real-time feedback on The Guardian's iPhone application
Real-time web gives real-time feedback on Guardian iPhone appTwitter is transforming the way that digital products are launched.
Notes and quotes from Ecommerce Expo: Part 3 - "Social commerce prioritisation: Where should we start?"
I've been posting a series of the notes and quotes I made at the London Ecommerce Expo in Earls Court. So far I've featured a case study in multi-variant testing from British Airways, and a presentation by Trenton Moss of Webcredible about optimising the purchase process. Today I wanted to turn my attention to 'social commerce'. "Social commerce prioritisation: Where should we start?" - Andy Leaver, Bazaarvoice Andy Leaver of Bazaarvoice opened by making a point that Google may turn...
Social media unplugged: Part 4 - Google Bookmarks, Fark and Mixx
During the course of this week I've been studying the user experience when you encounter social bookmarking services for the first time. This has varied greatly, from something like Yahoo! Buzz with a comprehensive registration process which ends up asking you to confirm your 'buzz up' for the article that started your journey, to Newsvine, which just seems to throw up a browser security error if you are not logged in. In today's final part I'll be looking at Google...
Social media unplugged: Part 3 - Newsvine, Reddit and Facebook
This week I've been writing about 'social media unplugged' - finding out what the user experience is like when you approach social bookmarking for the first time via using an icon on a content site. I contend that having detected an attempt to share by a user who isn't logged in, these services need to provide an opportunity for an existing user to log in, for a new user to register, and they should take the opportunity to showcase their...
Social media unplugged: Part 2 - Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious
This week I'm looking at 'social media unplugged', finding out what the user experience is like if you click one of the multitude of share buttons that litter the web without being logged in to the service you are attempting to use. In yesterday's first part I examined Digg and StumbleUpon. Both of these put the novice user through a registration process, only at the end to have not captured the URL that they were hoping to submit. Today I'm...
Social media unplugged: Part 1 - Digg and StumbleUpon
Social media unplugged
A series of posts looking at the user experience of social bookmarking sites when people first visit them via clicking an icon.
Toby Moores and Mark Jones discussing social media and 'the third voice' at #newsinnovation
"It's not a few people talking a lot, it is a lot of people talking a bit" One of the more interesting panels at the News Innovation conference featured Toby Moores from Sleepy Dog talking about social media, alongside Mark Jones from Reuters. Part of the focus of the talk was how to capture 'the third voice' in the room. Politicians and journalists are used to conversing with each other in the set-piece of an interview of a press conference,...
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 6
This is the final post of a series based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare. What about when it all goes wrong? A lot of brands can be very cautious about potential negative brand damage from social media. And it is true - you might make mistakes, and you will definitely be criticised online....
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 5
This is the fifth of a series of posts based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare. Blogging With the rise of social bookmarking and the media championing Twitter, blogging has begun to seem distinctly old hat. It does look, however, to have survived the early predictions of it being CB Radio for the 2000s,...
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 4
This is the fourth of a series of posts based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare. Twitter Twitter has been, without doubt, the communications technology hype of the year. There are several ways that mainstream companies have been using Twitter - some more successfully than others. One approach is to simply announce all content...
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 3
This is the third of a series of posts based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare. The social bookmarking feedback loop The ratings you get on social bookmarking sites are valuable feedback, and some major news publishers utilise them to add value to their site. The Telegraph, for example, has a 'Most Dugg' widget...
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 2
This is the second of a series of posts based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare. Social bookmarking Social bookmarking icons have infected major publishers websites like some kind of Internet design plague. The vast majority of mainstream news sites and high profile blogs come equipped with a whole set of brightly coloured icons...
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 1
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic
An article based on my presentation at May's International Social Media Summit.
The Apprentice and the unintended consequences of social media
*** WARNING: Contains mild spoilers for last week's 'The Apprentice: Season 5 Episode 8' *** On Wednesday night I was pointed to Scoopler, a real-time search engine, by Phil Bradley's blog. Since The Apprentice had just finished on BBC One, I thought that would make a good test case. Sure enough, a search for The Apprentice turned up lots of tweets. It was an episode where the task was to re-brand the seaside resort of Margate, and one of the...
International Social Media Summit in London
Last week I was at the International Social Media Summit hosted by WebCertain at the British Library. Here are some of my highlights from the day Panel debate - Facebok vs Google vs Twitter This was a great format to kick start the afternoon after lunch. Andy Atkins-Krüger, Kristjan Mar Hauksson and Dixon Jones each defended one of the web giants against the others, to argue that they represented the future of marketing. They'd jumbled up their slides into a...
Upcoming Martin Belam presentation and blog training day
I wanted to briefly mention a couple of speaking and training events that I've got coming up. International Social Media Summit On Thursday I will be at the British Library, and for once I won't be skulking around trying to use it as an office, or be filming people for 'ambush' user testing. Instead I'll be speaking at WebCertain's International Social Media Summit. My presentation is called "'Teenager finds bat asleep in bra' or How major publishers are using social...
Local social: Contextual help for social bookmarking in the UK's regional press
Local social: Social bookmarking links in the UK's top regional papers - Part 2
Local social: Social bookmarking links in the UK's top regional papers - Part 1
Thoughts, notes and quotes from the Online Information 2008 Seminars: Part 1
Chinwag Live at the eCommerce Expo: "Social Media ROI"
Social media: Contextual help on US newspaper websites
Social media: Contextual help on 24 hour news TV websites
Social media: Contextual help on UK newspaper websites
Social media and www.bbc.co.uk
Social media and terrestrial television
Will The Telegraph's tie-up with eMusic expose the staff's guilty pleasures?
Social media and TV news: Measuring social media success
Social media and TV news: Measuring the social media success of Russia Today, Euronews and France 24
Social media and TV news: Measuring Al Jazeera's success with social media
Social media and TV news: Measuring Sky News' success with social media
Social media and TV news: Measuring the BBC's success with social media
Social media and TV news: Measuring CNN's success with social media
The impact of duplicate content on social media success for newspapers
Measuring This Is Plymouth's success with Fark
Measuring London newspaper success with social media
Measuring Metro's success with social media
Measuring UK newspaper success with social media
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Talks & presentations
"Journalism in the digital age"
I'll be appearing on a panel with Sarah Hartley and Iain Hepburn at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on Sunday April 11th. More details...
Posts of the moment
Day of the Triffids
If everyone suddenly went blind, how long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?
With professionals of this quality, who needs 'citizen journalist' enemies?
It is hard to argue that ethics and quality set the 'professional journalist' apart from the amateur blogger, if the 'professional' keeps publishing articles so wrong that they have to be deleted.
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Contact: martin dot belam at currybet dot net. © Martin Belam where appropriate.
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