Posts tagged ‘digital’
Fangs for the distraction
I came across a great phrase the other day – Time Vampires. Which seems to be commonly defined as distractions or events that take you away from your working day.
So hello, Twitter. And hi there to facebook and just about every other social networking site and blogging platform. It’s very tempting when inspiration is failing to strike to click over to bloglines and see what’s new or to have a quick look at BrandRepublic.
To be fair, I regularly find blog posts via my RSS feeds that are hugely relevant to whatever I’m working on at the moment. I just have to spend a lot of time wading through baby pictures, technology reviews and bitching to get to them.
I know some people who are really virtuous and only check their RSS feeds once a day. I don’t have that kind of self control but having just moved desks to one where my laptop screen can be seen by at least twenty people at least there’s a bit more of an incentive to stay productive.
Aligned to what I see as a future move towards more discerning social networking (only using the networks that really work for you), maybe we’ll see a Second Life style growth in inactive accounts on Twitter as the world remembers that they really do have to get that report finished.
A Presentation About Community, By The Community (and me)
Neil from Only Dead Fish had a presentation to make at IMM09 about online communities. So he crowdsourced ‘A Presentation About Community, By The Community’ by requesting slides from the planners, digital specialists, researchers and so on who read his blog.
The final presentation is below (including a slide contributed by moi, see if you can spot it).
Spotify: everyone loves free, legal music
Thanks to a shout out from James via facebook, I’ve been playing with Spotify and I’m hooked. Its like lastfm crossed with itunes, but with a superior selection of cheesy musical soundtracks : -)
Sadly I can’t download it to the work laptop (draconian IT policies), but I’m loving it on my home PC. Even better, it’s FREE, legal and all you have to do in return is listen to or view an ad (mostly public service announcements about direct.gov) every 20 mins or so.
What’s more, there’s no buffering and the interface is easy to get the hang of. I suppose in a perfect world you’d be able to access your Spotify account from any online computer, but maybe that’s asking a bit much…
Interested? It’s still in beta but you can sign up for an invite here or stump up for a premium, ad-free subscription at £10/month. Which, considering how much I spend on itunes, is quite reasonable.
What would you bin first from 2.0?
Ben over at Noisy Decent Graphics has thrown out an all-users tag:
‘what social network web 2.0 type things would you drop first and why?’
I have to say that I’m with him on his number 1 – Twitter. I tried twittering, but its just not right for me. In fact I’ve already dumped it.
The problem is that the texts I normally receive are requests for information like ‘what time is the meeting?’ which need replying to fairly quickly. I just can’t ignore the constant beeping that an active life on Twitter generates as somewhere in and amongst will be a text that actually needs replying to. But I can’t read every text/twitter as it comes in because I’m supposed to be, you know, concentrating at work.
But I’m NOT giving up without a fight:
Bloglines – I’m addicted. I love the mix of work/fun/friends feeds I’ve got on it and its ease of use. I’m also increasingly ‘clipping’ interesting blog posts rather than printing them out and storing them in my toolbox.
Flickr – not only a really useful photo storage/sharing tool but brilliant for sourcing (creative commons licensed of course) imagery for presentations.
WordPress – not because I love its usability (in fact its just got worse with a redesign), but because blogging (or quite often ranting in my case…) has connected me with so many interesting people.
Facebook – no, not for those ‘become a knight of the round table’ applications. Lots of my Uni mates moved to London and this is a great way of keeping in touch with them between visits.
What about you?
You don’t just create communities
There’s an interesting interview with Woody Harrelson in today’ Sunday Times. In it he talks about choosing to live in an environmentally conscious community in Maui which he describes as “we all get together for Thanksgiving and look after each other’s kids. It’s a real community, like one I’ve never been a part of in my life”.
This got me thinking about everybrand’s attempts to create communities online. Particularly in a jumping-on-the-bandwagon kind of way. The thing is, you don’t just create communities. You create a place where similarly-minded people can come together. Its not ‘I am brand, come worship at my website’, its ‘you love our stuff? that’s great, come and talk to us about how we can be even better and maybe connect with some people who love us too’. I know this isn’t exactly new news, but I’m constantly amazed by the number of brands that still don’t get it.
digital wins with winds of change
Upon reflection, it strikes me that my ranting about the weather actually leads on to a relevant point.
The web has obviously made responding to change much easier – for example my gardening client has pay per click campaigns queued up on google just waiting for the right weather conditions to arrive.
But its rare to see a DIY shed buying up the nearest 6 sheets as the first flakes of snow begin to fall to point out that they stock rock salt. Or a wet bank holiday weekend 
resulting in the local cinema taking out a more prominent ad in the local paper. Those media options would be ideal, but traditional media is too slow. You just can’t turn offline communications round fast enough. And that’s where online media will always win.
In the right hands, digital media can be truly reactive. Which I suppose begs the next question – will online media have to become a 24-7 operation to service this?
Come on in, the water’s lovely
I had a meeting with a chap from Digital and one of the gals from the support team this morning. We got round to wondering why this particular lady was quite happy emailing and googling but hadn’t ever bought anything online or downloaded music or set herself up on Facebook or Flickr.
It reminded me that not everyone is merrily swimming into the digital ocean. Lots of them are still paddling at the edge. Seventy-something percent of the UK might use the internet, but a heck of a lot of them are looking for someone to hand out armbands and take them for their first swim in e-commerce or social networking.
So which brands are going to be the ones giving swimming lessons? It seems to me that its going to be the ones that are familiar and safe – in other words high street brands. So why aren’t they exploiting this massive opportunity?
totally changing my mind, sort of…
I’ve changed my mind and signed up to facebook. Not because I was desperate to connect to everyone I worked with in 1998 or did my GCSEs with, but because I couldn’t get to all the brand facebook pages, plannery things and blogs without signing up.
So thats a dormant facebook account to add to the dormant myspace, second life, vox, plannersphere and god knows what else that I’ve forgotten about. I keep forgetting to twitter and then there is the three email adresses, this blog and my flickr that I actually manage to keep up to date with.
Surely someone is going to have to come up with a better way of accessing and monitoring all this social networking malarky? Or the entire economy is going to grind to a halt. How about an RSS-style single page that pulls all your social networking sites together? Has anyone heard of one? Please?
Taking a step back to look at Second Life
I’ve been thinking about Second Life recently and it seems to me that its quite an exclusive world – you either ‘get it’ or you don’t. If you’ve grown up playing computer games and especially role-play games, it’s a very comfortable environment, but if you’re more of a Microsoft office type person, its all very alien and hard going.
Add to that the amount of time required to understand the world and maintain an active presence in it and I think that although Second Life will undoubtedly be/is a real force and an active online community, but it won’t become part of everyday life for everyone.
Which means that any activity organisations use to get feedback/buy-in from users will inevitably have skewed results as it only attracts (and crucially retains) the ‘get its’.
The retention issue is a real problem. Some reports estimate that only 10% of those signed up to Second Life are active users, visiting at least once a week. Which leaves an awful lot of dormant accounts (including mine) included in the hype. According to CNN, only 16% of October ’06 registrants were still using the service 30 days later.
