



Thursday, December 03, 2009
Temporarily Closed

Epic App Fail

...this is Coke Zero's new 'Facial Profiler', designed to find a facial match on Facebook. After you connect your Facebook account with it, the app scans your photos (or you can use a webcam pic) then use fancy facial recognition software to match your face against others in the database.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody
If this doesn't virally trend to the top of YouTube I'll eat my own liver.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
'Chap-Hop History' by Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer
30 years of Hip Hop history, in 5 minutes, featuring Mr.B (The Gentleman Rhymer) and his banjolele. Check out his tour dates on MySpace.
Which reminds me, must renew my subscription to The Chap...
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Clicking for Charity

Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Derbyshire Social Media Cafe
Monday, September 28, 2009
Regarding Blogging...

Work with Conversify is still going strong, and the world of social media is throwing up fresh challenges for us daily. Meeting toy soldiers, coffee pirates and costume geeks at Steampunk convivials and Regency dances, and a plethora of real-world social events are keeping our weekends occupied as they invariably are at this time in the season.


Sunday, August 02, 2009
Dirk & Steele Author at Athena Isle, SL.

The event is a joint effort between Endeavor Creative, the awesome folks work with at Conversify, and Athena Isle Women, a group for women in SL. Conversify sponsors live events on Athena Isle in Second Life to showcase women authors as well as their virtual world and social media work. It was founded by my good friends Aliza Sherman and Monique Elwell to bring smart, sensible and affordable social media plans and execution to companies and organizations (and keeps me as their token UK bloke and pet Socail Media Stratagist/Project Manager).
Endeavor Creative is an Anchorage, Alaska-based consultancy run by another friend of mine, Taughnee Stone, specializing in blogs and social media and regularly work closely with Marjorie.
Free Fire King tshirts will be given to all who go on the 4th, and a full transcript of the event will be available on the Athena Isle Women blog later in the week.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Have You Claimed Your FB Fan Page URL?

Friday, June 26, 2009
Changing My Twitter Name (without losing followers)
I started on Twitter with a couple of friends the week it came out of Beta, and we had no idea just how big this would get a few years down the line. Back then I happily hid behind the nom de plume of 'Lactose the Intollerent' so that I could voice my opinion while being a part of a large news organization and with out the fear of repecussions. Times, however, have changed.
Now I work in social media and, frankly, my name is my brand. Hindesight is a marvelous thing, and it's unlikely back then we'd have gone for the names we did if we'd have know what Twitter was to become. Consequently I've decided to risk changing my username to my real name, and take close stock of the consequences.
Here is how I changed my Twitter name (hopefully) without losing any followers.
First, I checked my name was available. Important one this... ...bingo, all was clear.
Second, I made the name change. You can change your Twitter name at any time on the ’settings’ page at Twitter.com. Piece of cake. Bob's ya uncle. Yada, yada.
Third, I create a new account with my old Twitter name. I added a pic, chanced the background, added a URL to the new @nikhewitt twitter account, and posted a single tweet telling folks my name had changed. I also had to change the graphic on my background which, luckily, I'd saved as a PSD when I did it.
Forth, I let folks know through my old account, now @nikhewitt, that the name had changed but they needed to do nothing about it. I just did this for 'belt and braces' really, so they don't see something they don't recognise popping up in their stream.
Fifth, I ran around quickly changing the resorces I know used the old name/RSS stream, like the widget on the blog, FriendFeed, a few Ning sites, any links I could think of, PodBean etc. I'm sure there's a few stragglers, but I'll pick them up when I notice them and there's nothing important. Disco.
Including writing this post, the whole thing probably took about an hour.
Doing it this way I won’t lose any of my followers (touch wood) and they’ll all see the name change as their Twitter clients refresh. I did, however, miss a couple of @replys direcly after the switch. Most Twitter apps won’t update existing tweets with a new name until they are restarted, it seems. As a result a couple of @replys went to the old account. This was literally just for 20 minutes though, but if you're doing this yourself be sure to monitor your old account for a bit so you can catch missed replies and update your follower of the name change.
Painless.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
New Podcast on Microblogging

Monday, June 22, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The League of Marvels
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Been Busy
Where have I been? Short answer, busy.
Suddenly, I was self employed again with all that that entails. It's been a long time and, at first, I didn't like it very much. Day time television is appalling and it's hard to go from a dynamic creative envoironment (even one within an old institution like Northcliffe) with good friends of some 6 years standing, to suddenly having to make all the running. Gotta be honest, it took me a while to get my head around it. I'm easing into it now.
Friday, April 03, 2009
Can Local Newspapers Still win at Digital?

We're living in the Information Age. We all know a local blogger with his iPhone can get a news story out in seconds and to a targeted audience via the likes of Twitter, Seesmic or to their active social group on one of hundreds of social networking portals.
They can monetise this on a blog with AdWords or Affiliate Programmes, often automatically. The audience now expects content up-to-the-minute and are growing accustomed to having it on tap when it's convenient for them to read it.
A friend of mine made a comment last week: "The midweek Man City v Aalborg match went to penalties, so the paper couldn't print the score. I didn't know who'd won. What's the point?"
Plans have recently surfaced in th UK from Sir Jim Rose, former Ofsted chief appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary school curriculum, which said children are to 'leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication'. All this, and these fresh new consumers are getting used to getting their information for free.
Can we compete with this? Yes, I really believe we can. But we're going to have to seriously step it up a gear. Sorry folks, but things are going to have to change. Today. With the credit squeeze not run its course and readership down, sacrifices need to be made.
Sure, we dropped the ball a bit to start off with, a lot of folks did, but we're going to go seriously wrong and seriously miss the digital boat if we're not careful. I hope we haven't already. As large organisations, often spread out across the country and sometimes lacking those direct channels of communication, many have a certain resistance to change and a poor ability to respond. So do small local institutions. Put simply, we can't afford this any longer. If you sit around thinking about a new idea, you're invariably passed by someone else doing it.

Digital is where we should be driving traffic, where we can provide the excellent journalistic content we have in abundance to a targeted online audience. Engaging them in debate. Allowing free commentary and inviting opinion. Giving the visitor a sense of ownership in our established and trusted local brands. Giving them resources and information they need to take their community forward.
Here we can sell our advertising and upsell services. Here we can offer the audience a truly local and lasting experience they’ll want to revisit.
We live in troubled times. Redundancy overshadows everything these days. I appreciate cuts have to be made and the business has to be streamlined for the future for us to survive, but, let's make sure those cuts are happening in the right places.
Much of our industry, print journalism, is lacking perspective in this new arena. Many in print media have such a fondness for their medium and its tradition they're loathed to look beyond it. Many simply don't understand the urgency or the medium.
We can't all stay up-to-date on what's happening out there in the digital soup and see what new avenues are open to us. Trust me, unless it's a full time job, it's almost impossible. We're dipping our toes in, sure, but we need to commit. We need to dedicate resources to staying informed and to moving forward.
It's important that we have digital teams with the resources they need to respond, fast, to changes and advances in digital media. If you already have one, hold on to it like gold dust. These are not the people you want to be making redundant right now, no matter how tempting it might look on paper.
Invest: we have to give them good, industry-savvy, leadership. We need to grant these people the ability to control our digital brands directly, to say, 'we are going to make video for the website', and give them the power and resources to make that happen. Don't leave it too late. These people are the new Gutenbergs.
Results are happening, slowly. Internationally, ex-Morning Call editor Roger Oglesby is leading the first major American newspaper to switch from print to entirely online - the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last newspaper on Tuesday, March 17.
The print world is watching as it maximises resources and cuts print overheads. Johnston Press is making a foray into social media and experimenting with 'embedding its sites at the hearts of communities' through Kick Apps etc; and have a remit to 'make sense of all the information that's bombarding people' on a local level.
Northcliffe is great at exploiting specific database content (take a look at www.lastingtribute.co.uk for an outstanding delivery system for white-labelled local obituaries) and its slow addition of video and RSS to the 'thisis' network is a good beginning.
Trinity Mirror has started using Pluck's SiteLife features on its national sites, offering commentary on all suitable articles, the ability to build site profiles and to make recommendations, breeding social connectivity and community.
It's not fast enough. This is stuff other news brands and the independents were doing two years ago. The internet is awake and generating news and ideas 24/7. We need to look our best and be there, front and centre, now.
Editors have to embrace digital wholeheartedly and journalists have to 'write for digital'. Look to those in your paper who write for digital already and strengthen what they have by giving them the ability to try out new ideas. Be open to those ideas and be ready to respond to what's new.
Let's deliver our stories from where the story is happening and tell people directly that the information is there to be read. We need to write for online as well as offline. Write for Twitter, and RSS, and Facebook apps. Think titles, keywords, that important search engine optimisation that will bring in the long-tail traffic your advertisers need.
We also need to let the user in. We need to grant them a platform for their content as well. While offering our own professional opinion, well crafted and respected as it is, we need to place that content shoulder-to-shoulder with the voice of our audience and of the community.
We need to aggregate other local news and become portals for local affairs and information. We need to engage our communities in new ways, and to make ourselves THE place people come for everything local.
We also need to present in a clear, concise, and user-friendly way. The search engines will bring us the traffic if we do it right, and right now that's one of the only online sales metrics easily available to us. We have masses of long-tail local content, information, and history - let's get it out there quickly (and monetise it).
To the larger brands I would say that you need to give a general directive to all parts of the business that an online experience MUST happen, quickly, with as little resistance as possible. Experimentation in finding other ways for us to distribute and aggregate our journalistic and advertising content has to be a priority. Nothing is yet written in stone.
I'm sorry, but our print editors can no longer be expected to stay up-to-date on what's good for their local digital brand. This lack of information can't stand in the way of, basically, making money. Our large organisations move slowly and, at the moment, simply can't react quickly enough. This has to stop, even if (I hate to say) it means taking away the autonomy of local editors to affect what we do with mobile, online, and with our digital information. This is the future of the business we're talking about here after all, and our business is journalism and selling advertising.
We have the best content and well-respected brands. Get your digital team in sync and make sure the people leading them are tech-savvy early adopters who know the industry. Give them the power to react, and the funds to do so. We can still do this, and we know we have to. Let's keep our minds, and resources, open to a digital future.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Celebrate Life
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Journalisum News
On the whole, it caught the main points. While it's not how I would have presented it (specifically the graphic) but I guess they had to get the redundency thing in somehow (technically being the opposition to Hold the Front Page, which is a Northcliffe side-line). Anyway, I've been asked to write a 'Comment Piece' for their site, which I'll cross post here, in the next few weeks.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The Pizza Pi(e) of Rassilon [from iPhone]
Being Pi day, and my birthday tomorrow (42, I *am* the answer to the ultimate question), the loverly @SparklyJem spend 2hrs in the kitchen trimming Montery Jack into shape and creating the mother load of cool pizzas for a few assembled guests.
The 'piesta resistance' being this, the Pizza of Rassilon (additional 'Dalek bread' not shown). Home made pizza dough. Home made pizza sauce. More pics (inc. creation process) on Facebook and Twitpics.
My idea of a prefect birthday cake :-)
Monday, March 09, 2009
Plugging Wyoming

Sunday, March 08, 2009
WTF is 'Affiliate Marketing'?
It must be one of the new buzz words going around.
I was asked by a client the other day "Do you do affiliate marketing?". I said yes, it was something I could sort for them on blogs etc. to get a token gesture ROI back on their campaign, then I was asked "Er, great, what is affiliate marketing?". Despite the familiarity of the phrase, it's still true that a lot of folks are just not aware of what it is and what this 'type of marketing' is all about.

It never really dawned on me that the door swung both ways. It does. Both sides are getting something from this arrangement, and it pays to play both sides. "Endorse me and I'll give you a cut, but if I don't sell what they want then I'll do the same for you". While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.
For me, in my halsian SEO days, it was also a bit of grey-hat cheeky spamdexing too. A way to get your site ranked for selflessly (textually) linking out to related topics. All good stuff, but incredibly time consuming. Things, thank heavens, have changed.
A lot of people are enticed with affiliate marketing. It looks easy money and business can be run from the convenience of the laptop. There are, in fact are a number of programs and information that can help you get started should you be tempted.
Here’s a few I’ve tried at different times:
Advertising | The PPC everyone wants. I’ve done my time in the trenches on this one. I ran the 2nd biggest campaign in the UK for a year (shudders). | |
Review | Get paid to blog reviews of products. | |
Advertising | Links are sold ‘in an area of your site’. | |
Advertising | Textual linking from your articles, a personal favourite I’ve included on some BIG clients sites. Not usable with Blogger, alas. | |
Advertising | Ad banners, links, etc for your site. | |
Advertising | Integrate ads into your pictures. Can be fiddly. | |
Commission | Sell items from ebay. | |
Commission | Sell items from Amazon. Good click-through rates in my experience. | |
Commission | Show ads on your site based on direct bids. |
Anyone can add this kinda thing to their blog or site, and I recommend you do. If you have good content that brings in traffic, this is a perfect small revenue stream that soon accumulates. It’s not something I really do any more, but it’s certainly something you should consider to make a few pennies back. Writing good content should be rewarded, and if no one else is going to do it you may as well do it for yourself. If you have a niche topic, so mush the better for targeting.
Put it this way, this blog is about nothing. Jack, nada, bupkiss. Zero except my momentary rantings, and it's made between £15 and £65 a month on AdWords for the last 4 yrs. That's a lot of long-term Scooby Snacks for sweet FA.
Optimising this stuff to get max coverage is a hardcore dark art, and alas I’m a different kind of wizard (the 1d4 hit points kind) even though the merchant side of AdSence (AdWords) is probably still second nature. All the optimization of a big campaign isn't really your problem though, and not really needed where your just directing traffic and not paying for click-throughs (we're not The Daily Mail lets face it). The only tactic you need to consider is getting genuine visitor value in your keyword rich content and keep on trucking your SEO etc. Anyone can use affiliate marketing nowdays, and in moderation how's it gonna hurt?
So, WTF is affiliate marketing?
It's money in the bank and easyer than you think ;-)