Facebook: the lobbying boiling pot (Part II)
Posted Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 7:24pm in PR General, Technology | 6 Comments
In February I wrote about how organisations and individuals are increasingly using Facebook as a platform to lobby against commercial companies and associations. Users of the platform are setting up Facebook Groups to assemble like-minded individuals and fellow protesters to fight their cause. The most notable example being UK student organisation, the National Union of Students (NUS), against HSBC in a bid which successfully stopped the bank from introducing new charges to fresh graduates.
BARRIERS TO ENTRY ARE LOW, EXPECT MORE TO FOLLOW
As predicted, and given the ease of setting up a Facebook Group, one might expect that the use of the social networking platform for lobbying and protesting purposes would not end there. And it hasn’t according to the Economist which reports on a group of “Canadian grannies and other small investors” who successfully used the site to force a number of financial firms into repaying millions of dollars in doomed investments in asset backed-commercial paper which were marketed as safe. In much the same way as the NUS example, campaigners set up a Facebook Group to “trade information, provide mutual support and plot strategy.”
“AN AMAZING TOOL” THAT WORKS BOTH WAYS
A significant point to note is the response by the group’s administrator who explains that Facebook played a huge part in the initiative as it brought together “people who would never have met in real life, from pig farmers and retired loggers to MBA students and pastors.”
Not only did the Facebook Group help the campaigners but it also helped the lawyer who developed the reimbursement solution “because it helped him understand the concerns of small investors and gave him a way to talk to them.”
CAVEAT
The writing’s on the wall. Facebook is proving to be a successful platform for anyone (stress: anyone) to take action against perceived wrong doings of big business, provided that the cause is worthy of a fight and the ‘crowd’ is big enough. It’s safe to say that we’ll see more examples like this as time goes by. But, as shown above, an anti-corporate Facebook Group can be useful to both parties as it can provide the ‘accused’ with details and insights of the complaints and concerns.
A few ideas to improve Twitter
Posted Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 9:27am in Blogging, Technology | 13 Comments
It’s been almost four months since I began participating in the…um, Twittersphere (shoot me now) and needless to say I’m pretty hooked like the majority of its members judging by its continuous growth. It really is a great tool. I used to think it wasn’t a viable means of connecting with new people but how wrong I was.
That said, it really is quite minimalist in its features and let’s be honest, there’s not much to it. I appreciate that one of the reasons people like using Twitter is because it is simple by design. However, personally, I think it can be improved to make that tweeting experience all the better. Here are a few random ideas:
TEXT EDITOR
To help you emphasise the points you’re trying to make in your tweets wouldn’t it be great if you could add bold and italics to the text? For example, say someone posed the question: “What did you have for dinner today?†I could reply, “A splendid coq au vin was served and it tasted beautiful!”
Because I eat foods like coq au vin every night, of course.
Okay, the example I’ve given here isn’t great but hopefully you get my point. One thing I’ve noticed through blogging and writing other drivel online for the past few years is Americans love using itallics. They love them. No really they love them. This idea should get a thumbs up from some of them.
HYPERLINKS
Trying to explain one’s self in 140 characters is sometimes quite hard; particularly when you’re discussing complex and descriptive issues such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Often you might want to include a link to backup your argument and prove your notion which, by the time you’ve converted said link to TinyURL, you’ve used around 25 characters. Bummer!
With this in mind, wouldn’t it be far easier to create links in your already written text? That way you have more characters to play with and you’re also giving fellow tweeters more of an idea of the content of the link they are clicking on. Everyone’s a winner, baby, that’s the truth.
IMAGES & VIDEO
A picture paints a thousand words and you might say a video paints a million. If Twitter provided an unintrusive method for users to include images or embedded video into tweets then it would A. Save users time by not having to click out to another webpage and B. provide more context to their tweets.
Obviously nobody wants to see huge YouTube videos in people’s tweets; they would take up far too much of the user’s screen real estate and it would just look cluttered. However, if there was a way in which a small link could be provided and, should a user want to view the video, it would expand and play in the Twitter page itself after it was clicked then definitely a benefit in my opinion.
TWEET-TO-TWEET
If you use Facebook (and let’s be honest who doesn’t?) then you’ll know that the Wall-to-Wall facility comes in useful as it allows you to read conversations between two of your friends. One thing that annoys me about Twitter is sometimes you one only see one side of a conversation and, if you’re a nosey inquisitive person like myself, often results in clicking multiple links to discover the full topic of conversation.
What would be great if Twitter provided a means to view discussions by conversing members in a chronicle order cancelling out non-related tweets in the process. In a Tweet-to-Tweet type stylie.
What do you think? One or two useful ideas for the evolution of Twitter or just dumb thoughts that could potentially ruin it?
MCWS - Future of mobile & online content
Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 at 9:14am in Media, Technology | 2 Comments
Simon Andrews - Chief Strategy Officer - Worldwide, Mindshare Interaction
“Everyone’s concerned about the size of their mobile bill,” says Andrews. This is going to prohibit the take up of the mobile web. However, “the mobile content market is four times bigger than the user paid internet content market.” Andrews believes that giving stuff for free changes everything and ‘free’ is going to drive mobile content in the future.
You’ll take a traditional model to attract eyeballs and give content away for free with advertising.
“Money follows the audience.”
In the short term, mobile content has been under-hyped. In the long term, it’s been over-hyped.
Andrews states his reasons to believe that mobile content will take off:
Increase of good content: MySpace Mobile, Facebook Mobile - “we’re finding ways of marrying the regular internet with the mobile web.”
Price - Charging people vast amounts of money for data doesn’t work and the mobile companies are realising that fact.
Standard of phones - On average, consumers change their mobile phones every 18 months because the technology’s advancing quick.
Infrastructure - 3g networks.
Google - Making the web easily accessible on a mobile.
O2 Xda Orbit 2
Posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 5:04pm in Off topic, Technology | 4 Comments
Like quite a few others, yesterday I received my O2 Xda Orbit 2 mobile phone by the cool cats at marketing agency, VCCP. Steve Cater, who’s involved in the outreach, emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking if I’d like to try out the phone with no obligations to write about it. Of course they’d like me to (that’s the point of blogger outreach after all) and of course I will oblige after I’ve tried and tested it.
I was involved in the very good O2 Cocoon outreach last year and Amelia from VCCP very kindly shared with me the details of the initiative which I used when I presented at BizDays in Bucharest in November.
I haven’t had a chance to play around with the Orbit 2 yet but some of its key features are: 3 megapixel camera, touch screen, sat nav, Windows Mobile 6 Professional, mp3 player and FM radio. According to Neville Hobson, there’s a four day trial with CoPilot Live sat nav so I’m planning on giving it a whirl also.
Ewan from SMS Text News mentioned on Twitter that I can write a review for his blog so I’ll probably do that if he’s still up for it. Might be a bit like a 12 year old writing a piece for the Economist, however, given my lack of mobile knowledge. Compared to Ewan at least.
The Xda blog can be found here. No content on it yet though.
Media Content World Summit: London
Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008 at 8:10pm in Business, Media, Technology | 3 Comments
MEDIA CONTENT WORLD SUMMIT
LONDON 29 FEBRUARY 2008
8AM - 5.30PM
COURTHOUSE HOTEL KEMPINSKI (MAP)
Anyone going? I am. I’ll be live tweeting it too. Follow me on Twitter.
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Summit Chair - Sebastian Moertiz, President, MPEG Industry Forum
Morning Keynote – Simon Andrews, Chief Strategy Officer - Worldwide, Mindshare Interaction
Chris Townsley, Director of Strategic Accounts, Limelight Networks
MORNING PANEL:
Chair & Moderator: David MacQueen, Senior Analyst, Head of Mobile Media, Screendigest
Participants:
• Simon Protheroe, New Media and IT Director, Eidos Interactive
• Giorgio Riva, Managing Director, RCS Digital
• Patrick Jubb, Head of Global Communications, Vodafone
• Dan Whiley, Senior VP Digital Media, MTV Networks International
• Simon Gunning, Senior Vice President Digital, EMI MUSIC
Lourens de Beer, Managing Director UK, Minick
AFTERNOON KEYNOTE: MEDIA CONTENT SECURITY
AFTERNOON PANEL:
Chair & Moderator: Simon Drinkwater, Vice President Sales EMEA, Entriq
Participants:
• Myles Macbean, Vice President, Disney Online, Walt Disney Internet Group Europe
• Patrick Walker, Head of Content Partnerships EMEA, Google (YouTube)
• Paul Kanareck, Head of FM Ventures, Freemantle Media
• James Fabricant, Director of Video and Head of Entertainment, MySpace Europe
• Barbara Stelzner, VP, Director News and Programming, CNBC Europe
Arno Koch, Senior Solutions Development Manager, Nokia Siemens Networks – Closing Presentation