Green Tea Ice Cream

[12:00ish] My first unconference! So far, I’ve met a bunch of interesting people at a “speed networking session”, done a session myself (shared with Dan Thornton) on our own use of social media and Facebook marketing. Dan was fascinating on similar work he’d been doing on a rather larger scale for a large publisher of magazines (more detail later), especially issues of measurement and demonstrating return on investment (here’s a pdf of my own presentation - high-wycombe-for-pdf-builds). Right now I seem to be the only person showing up for a session on using Web 2.0 and social media for getting environmental messages across - even the presenter seems to have cried off. Nice to have a room to myself for a minute though.

I think I’ll duck into the back of Second Life Adventures instead.

[13:16] The Second Life talk (on how a theatre company called Pilot Theatre can make use of Second Life). Finally an excuse to install the Second Life client, now that I’ve got a machine that’ll run. Caron “CJ” Lyon runs through the Second Life basics - the environment, the culture, the all-important economy. Key issue - you retain the intellectual property of what you create in Second Life. 119 thousand residents are spending small amounts of money ($6 here and there) but a few hundred are spending several million Linden a month (divide by about 150 to translate into $ - serious money). Currently around 42,000 concurrent users. Over 1 million logged in over the last 60 days. Grown from around 90 thousand 18 months ago “and this is the lowest I’ve seen it for quite a while”.

Concept of avatars is very alien to many people…Oops, got distracted in the Freebie Shop once I escaped the basic induction…Is it 2pm already? (this last in a good way!) Great session. Nice to see someone using Second Life in a concrete, useful way as opposed to some extension to a PR strategy.

[14:00] The second instance of Social Media Process Measurement turns out to be Part 2. Oops. Am struggling to keep up with where this session has been from. OK, measurement - theory vs practice. Fashion vs actual value. Core business practice

OK - it’s not just the cool people who are using this stuff - it’s the fundamentalists, the Creationists and the secret police…Is the only measurement it’s impact on the real world? The danger of events like this (Toby @ Sleepydog) is that of the echo chamber. But there does seem to be a tendency towards tribes once more…

More random outputs - failure of the law to and legislation and business practices to keep up with Web 2.0…the same with education. The need to go with ‘wrong’, innovation, different training, different metrics…

A long complex metaphor from someone about Myers-Briggs and precedents. I’m quite confused by that. Either, we’re back onto the slowly evolving change in the concept of value - people who sell skills or services but who aren’t interested in trademarks or copyright or intellectual property elements.

Just how do you make money out of this stuff?

Meanwhile, the amplification effect - we can use it but it can be used against you? And how do you sell the argument? Numbers for managing directors, the right story to unite a particular community - but how do you measure as to whether the community is good bad or indifferent? Or ready? When the community is ready, it just moves…

Costs - time and effort. And infrastructure. Who pays for the infrastructure? The level of creating value is at the level of the people who made a system. We can use a recreational model to get people engaged but the people who build the system work at a business level to make money out of it. (How? Well, some people do…) Eventually, it will become infrastructural - and has to be treated as infrastructure.

What’s the value in a university? You need a mix of different people, like a shopping mall…

OK, this is going off in all directions like pinball. Impossible to follow!

Right - they’ve (we’ve) finished - two key terms are proposed - amplification and infrastructure…

(Me - I’m not convinced reality and the capacity of unpleasant people to mediate social software as much as the nice people have been taken account of particularly.)

[15:20] Waiting for a Rick Astley roll (whatever) to finally finish and hoping that the podcasting moderation session might actually start. The unconference is unstitching a little (possibly too many people who all know each other a little too well?)

OK. We’re now waiting for the results of the Rick Roll. Evidently none of of these people had to live through this first time around. Can we start the podcasting session please?

<tumbleweed>

[15:30] They’re still trying to play a video of a Rick Roll. The technology is not cooperating. A lot of nice people here but they’re definitely dropping into ‘Mafia’ mode. (Am suddenly reminded of the Haddock crew…)

[15:38] We’re on! The history of the Britcaster forum. All went very well until late 2006 when there was an outbreak of backbiting and stick-fighting and so on and so forth…The owners declined to release the backend, servers etc - probably a good thing in retrospect. Then, in 2007, UK-Podcast Forum and National Grid. A large part of the day managing this was spent getting rid of spammers.

Pete teamed up with Green Dragon (!) and Phil Coin (since disappeared entirely, apparently). They started up teaandpodcasts.com. They used a back-end called Vanilla (getvanilla.com). Free, open source…Not a single spam sign-up on teaandpodcasts ever. [Why?] About 100 accounts - 20% of the people posted 80% of the content. But a few months ago, a bit of a podcast linkfarm - people just posting links and going away again.

Why? He doesn’t think there’s much of a UK podcast forum. They’ve since mothballed it. UK-podcasts has also shuttered. Latest attempt also following suit. (Suggestion from listener - a lot of users have gone to Twitter? And this has just grown?)

Yup - one suggestion was to have a creative commons audio book - take something from Guttenberg, read a chapter each…Nothing happened. A lot of talk but not much action. Possibly podcaster are more protective about what they do compared to vidcasters who are more open - they want to control things completely…

[Vid casting person] Tried some podcasts, hated them. Video is instantaneous still whilst the entry bar for podcasting kept raising, too much professionalism…[Will that happen to video?]

Some people complained that they didn’t feel welcome at tea and podcasts…If you are thinking of starting a place for people to convene, ask yourself if this is the right thing to do. Your target audience might be using twitter. Go where the people already are. Still, Google banner ads on tea and podcasts made an absolute fortune. A few usefully based and relevant ads will pay off your costs.

Mintybuff! A bit of hoo-hah on the forum (Google this.)

Conclusion - if you are thinking of starting a community forum, ask if it is the right thing to do; don’t use popular forum software - it makes you a bigger target for spam. [Or use Ning? Or Facebook? Or Twitter? Go where your audience are...]

Last word syndrome - isn’t this a boy thing?

[16:01] Right then - on to

“Email Works - Social Media & Scalability, the paradox - how to build a list of prospects, personalise the broadcast, and build credibility.”

Though first someone is going to show us the solution to salvaging the UK podcasting community.

Okay. Email!

[16:16] Chris Hambley started by building up large lists of prospects and sending them, well, emails. (Me) And this is about as basic as it gets! It’s still the the standard for comms throughout the most of the world!

All too easy to assume that this is where your client base is - Web 2.0, etc., etc., etc…

However, (Chris) there are ways to use email to engage with people more personally - a time-shifted conversation which is pre-written. Like an auto-responder. Make that infinite and you have a very strong method to build a conversation up over time…You could take your niche - based on research that people need to re-visit the product a number of times - credibility needs to be built up with people. You can do that with a series of emails. You can write a course (for example) in whatever you’re selling, a ten part course, put your name, email in. It goes into the infinite responder series and the first one goes out - day one of a series. But you write it in a very personal way. And in the capture form, you have data fields where they can put in a name and an interest which you can then extract and use in the email itself…

And you build in a ‘please get in touch’ call to action.

[Question - are we really putting enough effort into the way we construct our news emails leading up to events?]

(me) And with email, the more people you have, the finer grained your response and provision of relevancy can be…And the more people you have signed up, the more profitable it becomes to make that content relevant.

(CJ) And texting? (but only useful one-to-one)

(me) Is social media actually useful?

(Julius) Aggregators? Are they useful?

(me) Too much hard work! (Chris) And do I really want to see all of that information all the time?

(J) But surely the new generation…?

(CJ) Surely exaggerated - most young people actually struggle with a lot of this stuff - they aren’t taught it at school

…..

Snippets - “But a blog is an ego trip, isn’t it?

…..

I was falling asleep at that point (the five o’clock start was kicking in) and I didn’t feel up to hanging around in the rain in High Wycombe for an hour or two waiting for whatever was happening in the evening. So I cleared off. On balance, a worthwhile day, though some sort of formal break for lunch might have been an idea.