New Tech Post - Social Media

Our Top 10 Irish Twitter Influencers

Conor Harrington — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 06:58:27 +0000

Centres of gravity in the Irish Twitterverse.

Determining a list of the most influential tweeters can be a thankless task. Influence can mean many things to many people. For some, it’s purely a numbers game; those with the most followers are the most influential. For most however, influence is defined by a range of subjective characteristics so broad and personal that no two lists are the same.

When compiling this list of Irish Twitterati, we looked at several factors; how many followers they had, how many they followed back, how many tweets they had notched up, and whether these tweets were actually interesting and inspiring, or of the Jed-prefixed variety. However, the deciding factor was, as ever in these cases, a subjective choice. So, while many will feel that this list is inherently flawed, we can at least console ourselves in the knowledge that theirs is too.

@glinner: Graham Linehan rose to prominence as the co-writer of seminal Irish sitcom Father Ted. He has also put his name to comedy shows such as Brass Eye and The IT Crowd. It is not unusual for the mind behind so much cult comedy to have the 126,593 followers Linehan has at the time of writing, but his use of Twitter extends beyond the usual celebrity self-indulgence.

Linehan has used his influence on the social network to campaign for a variety of issues in Ireland, the UK and the United States, and was especially outspoken during the recent hacking scandal. He also started the #welovethenhs hashtag campaign in August 2009 in response to right-wing American criticism of the UK health service. The campaign was supported by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his successor, David Cameron.

Klout: 76
TweetLevel: 82.8

@topgold: Multimedia lecturer Bernie Goldbach is an American living in Cashel, and a stalwart of the Twitter and blogging communities here. He acknowledges that Twitter can mean different things to different people; some prefer casual online chat with acquaintances, while others glean more value from hashtag threads of interest such as the #edchatie thread he follows himself.

“I think influence is a measure of persuasiveness”, explains Bernie. “Over time, minor voices can have a measure of influence if those voices offer listeners value. On Twitter, that can be ambient intimacy, pointers to valuable content, or information about upcoming events. That’s how I decide who or what to follow.”

Klout: 62
TweetLevel: 74.4

@davidcochrane: The editor of Irish political forum Politics.ie, David Cochrane is never far from any Irish political issue on Twitter. His stream is a great source for links to discussion threads on the political issues of the day as well as some lively political debate.

Klout: 61
TweetLevel: 75.5

@arseblog: Andrew Mangan, aka Arseblogger, has been blogging about Arsenal Football Club since 2002, and is renowned for both his passion for the club and for his acerbic wit, for example this rather pointed barb at Welsh football pundit Robbie Savage. Interaction with his followers is key to his large following, even if he acknowledges that, “you can’t reply to all of them, it’s just impossible physically to reply to all of them”.

However, he notes, “Unless you reply to some of them, I don’t see what you get out of it, to be honest, because you can debate things, or have two people coming at the same thing from different angles. Without interaction, it just becomes a soapbox.”

Klout: 79
TweetLevel: 83.3

@miriamocal: Television personality Miriam O’ Callaghan’s balanced and unwavering anchoring of current affairs show Prime Time, coupled with her popularity with the Irish public, led to her being mooted as a potential candidate for President of Ireland recently. Despite such high standing, Miriam is an extremely responsive and engaged tweeter, whether raising awareness about a particular issue, or magnanimously apologising for her employer’s failure to cover Shamrock Rover’s latest game.

Klout: 59
TweetLevel: 65.6

@sendboyle: Green Party politician Dan Boyle may not have the same influence out of office, but few can claim to have ousted a government minister via social media. Boyle’s tweet expressing his lack of confidence in Willie O’ Dea set in motion the machinations which led to his resignation in 2010.

Should the Green Party ever recover from its damaging flirtation with Fianna Fáil, Boyle’s forthright, some would say naïve, insistence on tweeting things more suited to private conversation will likely have more ramifications than we can expect from more high-profile, and reserved, politicians’ tweets.

Klout: 49
TweetLevel: 66.7

@conor_pope: Irish Times journalist Conor Pope’s consumer advice is much sought-after these days, and he often mines Twitter for sources for his Pricewatch column. Conor is always willing to engage with fellow Twitterers, meaning that for aggrieved consumers, help can be just one tweet away.

“It has to be interactive”, he says of his tweeting. “You can’t just post self-publicising, puff, tweets. It has to be engaging, so it has to be interesting to people. You have to interact with people, and you have to really understand the medium, and not take yourself too seriously.”

Klout: 69
TweetLevel: 69.0

@nialler9: Niall Byrne is the editor of State magazine, and the recognised point of first contact for Irish music fans looking to hear the best new music, at home and abroad. Boasting an impressive 22,943 tweets under his belt, nialler9 is a bountiful source of streaming and download links for the best new talent out there.

Klout: 61
TweetLevel: 71.2

@guidofawkes: Like him or loathe him, there’s no denying the ability of British-born Irish citizen Paul Staines to stick in the craw of the administration and the established media in Britain. Under his would-be gunpowder plotting alias, Staines uses Twitter to take all the whispered rumour and plotting of Westminster and broadcast it to the masses.

Klout: 75
TweetLevel: 80.8

@marklittlenews: Former RTÉ news reporter Mark Little didn’t cower with the rest of the Luddites, waiting for online journalism to sweep his job away in a sea of unverified comment, opting instead to meet the challenges presented by citizen journalism head-on. Liberated by the interaction afforded by Twitter, he founded Storyful, a news curation service, which sifts through the reams of citizen sources on the Internet, and presents the reliable, newsworthy sources as news.

Mark sees authenticity, quality of content, and engagement as the key factors in having influence on Twitter, “I don’t necessarily think you have to constantly answer every query or engage with every person who retweets you or mentions you, but there has to be a solid level of engagement with people who follow you”.

Klout: 63
TweetLevel: 81.8

So, while Jedward, Ronan Keating and their ilk may remain top of the Twitter charts, the clear consensus among influential Irish Twitter users is that the pursuit of knowledge and engagement, rather than followers, is at the heart of Twitter influence. 140 characters is the great leveller in this case, as it is the quality of what you tweet, rather than your offline profile, that sets you apart.

What is the Social Semantic Web, and Why Do We Need It?

John Breslin — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:59:08 +0000

Social media is exploding! In a good way that is, not in a dramatic, cataclysmic manner. According to Bob Brisco, CEO of Internet Brands, more than half of all internet visits (in the US) are to user-generated content or social media sites - what we will term the Social Web. We've seen the rise of sites like Facebook (on which more time is spent than Google, Yahoo! and AOL combined) and Twitter (which today announced 100 million active users per month), and the fall of services like Bebo and Myspace.

Through social media sites, people are connected to others through the social objects that they create and share and co-participate in. These may be discussions, bookmarks, microblog posts or multimedia items, and can be on topics ranging from pets to music to holidays in Spain (or even about all three!).

Unfortunately, many social media sites act as data silos wherein the content that people are creating is locked. There are many isolated communities of users and their data. There's a real need to connect these 'islands', allowing users to have mobility from one service to another and to be able to bring their data with them (profiles, photos, posts, etc.).

So on the one hand, we have the Social Web, and on the other hand, we have an effort called the Semantic Web. What's that? Well, we as people can look at a web page and we can instantly recognise different facts. "New Tech Post is an online publisher." "They have an office in Galway." "Galway is a city in Ireland." But for a computer, it's a lot harder for it to extract these facts and to link them together. That's what the Semantic Web does - it creates computer-understandable statements or facts that can be linked together across different websites. Then computers can use these linked facts to help us find information, to carry out tasks, to reduce the time spent piecing information together manually.

We can also do the same thing for the Social Web, so that the things that occur on these sites could be made understandable to computers (using semantics). "John is a user of boards.ie." "John wrote this discussion post." "This post is on the topic of Television." "Mike replied to John's post."

The Social Semantic Web is the coming together of the Social Web and the Semantic Web. The Social Web is one evolution of the Web where we have moved from individuals posting information-type web pages to multiple people interacting on each page. In parallel, we've seen efforts to add more semantics to web pages, things like microformats and microdata, Google Rich Snippets and schema.org, and RDF, a Semantic Web standard from the W3C. This allows us to move from pages that are purely syntactic (e.g. defining styles for how to display text, headings, etc.) to semantic (describing the things mentioned in a web page).

Why should this marriage happen? It's a two-way street: the Semantic Web can help the Social Web and vice versa. We can use the Semantic Web to describe people, content objects and the connections that bind them all together so that social sites can interoperate via semantics. In the other direction, object-centered social websites can serve as rich social data sources for the Semantic Web, which has often suffered from the so-called chicken-and-egg problem (no cool applications without data; no data without cool applications). People are creating semantically-rich information through their everyday interactions with social websites: tagging objects, replying to posts, making friend connections, retweeting, etc.

As Tim Berners-Lee, one of the creators of the Web, said in 2006: "I think we could have both Semantic Web technology supporting online communities, but at the same time online communities can also support Semantic Web data by being the sources of people voluntarily connecting things together."

On the Social Semantic Web, there are a number of common vocabularies (sets of terms) that can be used to represent people, documents, social websites, etc. The first is called FOAF, or Friend-of-a-Friend. It is used to describe people and the relationships that exist between them - basically to provide a machine-readable version of a person's identity and personal profile along with their social networks. FOAF data is produced from a variety of sites including LiveJournal, Identi.ca and hi5. You can create a distributed identity using FOAF: bringing together separate networks from various services, and integrating them into a single whole (if so desired).

Another vocabulary is SIOC (pronounced 'shock'), developed by the author at DERI, NUI Galway and others. SIOC can be used to represent content (posts, comments, topics, etc.) on the Social Web for integration across a variety of platforms, and has been adopted in over a hundred frameworks including Drupal 7, Yahoo! SearchMonkey and the Newsweek website. By connecting content across different social websites, SIOC aims to enable new types of connections such as distributed conversations, virtual forums, unified communities, etc.

One common application for semantically-enhanced social content is in the search domain. With machine-readable versions of author names, number of replies, etc. for things like blog posts and forum discussions, this information can be used to enhance search results and add context to a result (showing something like "by John Breslin (32 Comments)").

There are some other vocabularies like Meaning of a Tag and the Online Presence Ontology that, together with FOAF and SIOC, can be used to form a vocabulary stack of reusable and combinable terms for the Social Semantic Web. This stack is used in applications such as SMOB, a distributed semantic microblogging architecture developed by Alex Passant that allows users to own their own microblogging hub and to augment their posts with semantic hashtags that link to shared concepts (e.g. pages on the Wikipedia).

While the vision of a Social Semantic Web may not totally infiltrate the Social Web we use today, we can at least see some aspects of it being realised through efforts like the Facebook Open Graph Protocol and Twitter Annotations, and new services like Bottlenose. With systems like Drupal 7 now producing social semantic data out of the box, Manu Sporny estimates that there will be hundreds of thousands of these Drupal deployments within the next two years. It will be exciting to see what cool applications people will build on top of this data.

I am co-author of the book "The Social Semantic Web" with Alex Passant and Stefan Decker.

Social Media: Three Steps Towards Making it Work for You

John Breslin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:01:24 +0000

In the spirit of Rich Moran's "business bullet books", here are three steps towards making social media work for you.

Step 1: Getting Onboard

Pick what services should you be on.

Choose Your Platform, Carefully: Depending on your audience, do you need to be on social networks, discussion forums (e.g. Google Groups or boards.ie), or something else entirely?

Spread Too Thin? Don’t waste time on a platform if your customers just aren’t there.

The Social Network Choices:

Twitter: What’s happening? Info streams.
Facebook: Everyone’s here, eek!
LinkedIn: The business network.
MySpace: Only if you’re selling music...
Bebo: Nearly kaput, even for 13 year olds.
Google+: Too early to define; no business pages, yet.

Decide exactly who you are.

Create Your Identity: Try and get a common brand that you can use across one or more platforms of your choice.

Pick Your “Forever” Username: Have a consistent username for your Twitter account or Facebook page.

Promoting Your Identity: Make sure you tell people about your social media identity where appropriate, e.g. in your e-mail signatures, on your website, in presentations.

Step 2: Joining In

Be part of the conversation.

Respond To Others, Meaningfully! There’s no point being a standalone broadcaster on social websites. You must engage with others, not just via your own channels.

Choose Who You Are Talking To: If you want to be a person of influence using social media, then the way to do it is to acquire engaged followers who are themselves active on the service.

Tell the world about your company, your services.

Use An Integrated Strategy: View this great video from Deanna Lee (Marketing VP at the New York Public Library) about how social media is just one part of your communications strategy.

Marketing Your Brand: If you don’t already have a sufficient community of interest around your company that you can leverage into an online community instantaneously, you may want to think about using targeted advertising, if available on your platform of choice.

Step 3: Keeping Up

Stay up to date with your interests and competitors.

Monitor Keywords: Set up searches for your own brand in TweetDeck, but also for keywords mentioning your competitors and your topics of interest. Make sure you use variants in your searches so you don't miss out on anything, e.g. "NUI Galway" OR nuig OR nuigalway.

Think about what’s coming around the corner.

The Semantic What? The next generation of the Web, encompassing the notion of “Linked Data” whereby it’s not just pages that are linked on the Web, but rather data with an associated meaning.

The World Is Going Hyperlocal: You may need to think about a web where one’s geolocation is strongly tied to their activities online: Facebook Places (now integrated with status updates), Foursquare, Layar, and more.

I will be speaking on these and other topics at the first Irish Executives Summit in Galway next week.

Eolaí: Painting Ireland through Social Media

Conor Harrington — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:14:03 +0000

As Irish artist and blogger Liam Daly shows off his Motorola Zoom tablet, the nerve centre of his social media-driven painting tour around Ireland, he first produces an armoured yellow case. It looks as though it could be used to transport vials of some dastardly chemical weapon as easily as a tablet device.

His G-Form Extreme Sleeve is reputed to be able to withstand any fall and it has already been, “not intentionally”, put to the test during his trek around Ireland’s thirty-two counties. Luckily only the tablet and case ended up under the wheel of a tractor in Kerry and sore knees aside, Eolaí, as he is known on Twitter and his blogs, is in good health as he approaches the half way mark on his journey.

The case and tablet, and some dry-bags for covering his painting equipment were funded by ten paintings commissioned over Twitter, beginning a artistic journey around Ireland fuelled almost entirely by social media.

Liam was, “one of the lurkers” on Twitter in its first year and as he and around one hundred other Irish bloggers began the first wave of adoption of Twitter in Ireland, the idea first occurred to him to marry his passions of painting and cycling through social media.

“I can’t remember why, but someone that I knew through blogging, once said to me about visiting them and doing a painting for them, that basically I’d get a holiday, and they’d get a painting, and I liked it.

“It kind of niggled away at me for a few years, and liking Twitter as much as I did I thought, “I wonder could I do something mad like the whole country?” When I was much younger, and skinnier, I toured across America and across Europe.

“I keep referring to it as a social media tour, but it’s 95% Twitter, really. There is a slight angle on Facebook, but Twitter has really driven it and it’s the Twitter people for the most part that have jumped in with the commissions and jumped into hosting me.”

Although the idea had been with him for some time, when he made the decision to undertake the tour, he made minimal preparations, preferring the spontaneity of taking to the road, come what may.

With modest funding from his ten commissions, Eolaí gan fhéile (he translates this loosely as “guide without a festival”, meaning he’s no saint), took to the road, relying on Twitter users to provide bed and board in exchange for a painting.

“It’s a bit ambitious but so far it’s kind of worked. The ‘nowness’ of Twitter means you don’t have to necessarily plan. You could spend everyday planning the next day and then you don’t spend time with people, and it’s very easy to do that, because with Streetview, I could pick the perfect roads inch by inch.

“I’ve barely touched it for research like that, though, because that takes time and I’d rather be talking to someone in the flesh that I’ve been chatting to online for years and have now met for the first time.”

Liam tweets about his activities under his Eolaí account, including photos of paintings and of vistas soon to become paintings, and having resolved some technical issues plans to use Audioboo to make the tour an all-round multimedia experience. The hashtag for the tour is #paintingtour.

He has been reluctant to track too much of his movements, however, being conscious of the privacy of his hosts.

“With social media, some people are anonymous, some people are pseudonymous, and you want to protect whatever level of privacy they would like, so I don’t want to publish a map that guides someone to their house.”

Liam has seen his email usage decrease by what he estimates to be 95% since he started using Twitter and, having in the past been a user of MySpace and Bebo, he is uncertain of how long Twitter will retain its influence.

“If you’d told me six years ago that I would have been doing this, I would have thought you were mad. I wouldn’t have known that it [Twitter] would exist, that I would participate in publishing banalities that have a value, even in a business sense, and that I’d ultimately visit loads of people. That wouldn’t have struck me as right.

“Given that email has almost disappeared for me, I wouldn’t be surprised if in two years we were saying,“remember that thing called Twitter, wasn’t that great fun?”.

“It’s particularly Twitter that has driven this trip, and I’m not convinced it will always be there, and if it was to go very quickly I would have hated myself for not trying this.”

Twitter, Liam believes, has a unique character which sets it apart from other social networks. Although, after having seen other networks fade into obscurity, he is unsure about its longevity, he has found offline tweeters to be refreshingly similar to their online personalities.

This has made it easier for him to make the transition from social media to social acquaintance as he meets a new host each evening.

“There’s something about that whole 140-character thing that kind of forces an honesty out of people. It’s very hard to pretend to be what you’re not. As a result, whenever I’ve met people, they have been exactly as I thought they would be.”

“You’ve got that shared history. Either you’ve been following each other for ages, or if you haven’t, you’ve at least looked through tweets to get a sense of each other. They’re not strangers at all, they’re people I’ve been interacting with for years, in many cases.”

Having stayed longer in Galway than planned thanks to its famously inclement weather, a well-rested Liam is conscious that he is not always as positive as this about the trip; the physical side of cycling around Ireland has at times proved difficult.

“It’s great fun as a concept in a pub. There are times when my knees don’t think it’s that much fun. The overly-ambitious aim is thirty-two counties. That might not happen. If it doesn’t, fine. I’ll have met loads of people and painted lots of pictures and cycled around.

“The people of Twitter have been fantastic. From being taken for a drive to buy supplies, to giving me things, to packing me lunches, people have gone way, way above and beyond, it’s been fantastic.”

Dublin Proclaims June 30 Social Media Day

Tom Murphy — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:23:52 +0000

Andrew Montague on his first day as Lord Mayor of Dublin welcomes John Hartnett, President of the Irish Technology Leadership Group.

The Lord Mayor issued a proclamation declaring June 30 as Social Media Day for the City of Dublin making it the first city in Europe to do so.

At the Irish Innovation Center over 200 people are gathering to celebrate the proclamation of Social Media Day by the city of San Jose.

At the event opening remarks will be made by Tom McEnery, former City Mayor, author, businessman and John Stanton, ITLG Executive Director & President of The Irish Innovation Center.

There will be a panel Moderated by Richard Moran, venture capitalist, author and evangelist for organization effectiveness.

Even if it is not possible for you to attend you can still participate online by registering at the ITLG website.

Yahoo Joins ITLG Panel for Social Media Day

Ina O Murchu — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 19:32:25 +0000

Dr Elizabeth Churchill is a Principal Research Scientist and manager of the Internet Experiences group at Yahoo! Research.

What makes this Social Media Day event special?

Historic event: The City of San Jose will officially proclaim June 30th as Social Media Day at the Irish Innovation Center.

Global participation via Tweets, video streams, Flickr photo sharing and more.

Videos and posts via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will connect you with the ITLG network and the Mashable.com audience worldwide.

Program highlights: Opening Remarks by Tom McEnery, former City Mayor, author, businessman and John Stanton, ITLG Executive Director & President of The Irish Innovation Center.

Proclamation by City of San Jose Councilman Sam Liccardo.

Panel Moderator: Richard Moran, venture capitalist, author and evangelist for organization effectiveness.

Diverse panel of entrepreneurs and social media experts:

Fergus Hurley, founder of Focal Labs and Clixtr, featured in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and winner of the 2010 CES Mobile App Showdown
Charles J. Orlando, author, relationship expert and Facebook personality nearing 500,000 fans
Philo Northrup, Co-founder of enVie Interactive and publisher of VIE, a new brand of social game that's a casual MMO
Kevin Spier of Bunchball, leader of "Gamification" technology used by companies such as ABC, NBC, Playboy, HP, Comcast, Warner Brothers, Nestle and other top brands driving consumer activity

We would love to have you join us and help us spread the word:

Twitter hashtag: #SJSMday

iBriefSeries: OpenHeatMap [VIDEO]

Ina O Murchu — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:53:39 +0000

OpenHeatMap makes it easier to visualise the locations of your Twitter followers and friends.

San Jose Social Media Day, June 30

Tom Murphy — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:33:11 +0000

June 30 is Social Media Day at the Irish Innovation Center in San Jose, California.

At 4pm there will be a live global linkup across the internet.

Live at the IIC will be a panel discussion involving Tom McEnery, Rich Moran, Charles J. Orlando, Fergus Hurley, Philo Northrup and Kevin Spier.

The subject for discussion will be centred on the importance of Social Media in the modern business and tech world. However, participants will be able to put questions to the panelists from wherever they are in the world by means of the various social networking tools that are available.

There is more information here and don't forget to register.

Social Media Day, Irish Innovation Center, San Jose, June 30 [VIDEO]

Ina O Murchu — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:24:27 +0000

A FREE live and online (Mashable.com/MeetUp.com) event with panel discussion to celebrate media becoming social. June, 30th, 4:00 p.m. PST

Informative social media discussion, high quality networking with leaders in business & technology.

Irish Innovation Center, 189 W. Santa Clara, Street, San Jose, CA 95113

To register go to: itlg.org/events/2011-SocialMediaDay/registration.php

Jennifer O'Connell on TheJournal.ie, it's Formation and Rapid Growth [VIDEO]

Ina O Murchu — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 09:40:56 +0000

Before stepping down from her role as editor of TheJournal.ie, Jennifer O'Connell spoke at the Dublin Web Summit Series which was held at the RDS.

In this interview she tells the story of how she became involved with TheJournal.ie and about its rapid growth.

The Library @Facebook: Books Have Gone Social

Tom Murphy — Mon, 23 May 2011 08:13:56 +0000

We all have books sitting our shelves that no matter how enjoyable at the time of reading we know we will probably never look at again. However, it is too much, almost sacrilegious, some would say, to throw them into the green bin for recycling.

Another reason not to dispose of them as if they were yesterday's newspaper is the thought that someone else, somewhere else might enjoy the book as much, if not more, than yourself. So, two questions arise, ‘Who are they?’ And, “Where are they?

The answer to both is Facebook.

Harnessing the power of the social network and the availibility of over half a billion users The Library @Facebook makes the sharing of books and just as importantly the thought and opinions about books that much easier.

Ian Lucey is the Founder of The Library @Facebook. He says it all began with a resolution he made to himself, “I decided I’d try re-educating myself this year. So, I said I would read a book a week for the year.

“I put a post up on Linkedin and asked, ‘What books should I read?’ A lot of people got back to me and said what they liked.

“About a week later I got deliveries of books into the office from people sending them to me. I thought, ‘That’s a very nice idea. We should build a community where we could encourage each other to read. Especially in the startup community.’

“I had about 70 odd books lying around the house and when I went through all of them there were probably six that I would have kept. I think most people are like that; they have a chunk of books sitting on shelves somewhere that they won’t read again.”

Ian also runs Lucey Technologies which has 13 staff and is based in Dublin, Ireland. It offers a cloud based collaboration software system which handles online payments for small and medium sized businesses.

“We hadn’t built anything in Facebook yet and I wanted to understand it a bit better. So, at the very worst it was going to be a very good training exercise for us.

“But the feedback on it has been great so far. It is great to see people you don’t know on book forums saying this stuff is brilliant.

“What we are trying to do is figure out, ‘Why can’t you build a global, online library where when you have finished a book you list the ones that you are happy to give away and just send it off to somebody.?' It only costs a couple of euro to post it off.”

Working with Facebook has its own set of challenges and getting people to OK at the trust screen is one of the key ones. Ian says, “People are so worried about what these third party companies are doing with them on Facebook. Everyone’s heart stops when this setting comes up, ‘Will I trust my app with this data?’

But the advantage of working with Facebook over normal websites that offer similar services is the potential to be really social.

“One of the features that we are going to put into the next iteration and that we are getting feedback on already is that you will be able to give rolling feedback on your books as you are reading them.

“I can post a thought on a book but then, instead of writing a book review at the end, I’ll be able to click into someone’s book review and see their thoughts as they read the book.”

As well as the App itself, you can visit The Library Facebook page as well.

Linkedin: Social Media Goldrush? [VIDEO]

Ina O Murchu — Thu, 19 May 2011 18:49:17 +0000

Linkedin launched its IPO today at a valuation of $45 which then rocketed to over a $114.00 before dropping back below $100.00 as traders took early earnings.

There is a clear desire for investors to put their money into social media companies and makes the future public offerings of such companies as Facebook and Zynga events of great interest in the tech sector and beyond.

Report by Ina O'Murchu

The Facebook Like Button A Year On [VIDEO]

Tom Murphy — Tue, 03 May 2011 10:39:08 +0000

It is just over a year since Facebook launched its like button. We take a look at how effective it has been in that time.

Report by Ina O'Murchu

Facebook Expanding [VIDEO]

Tom Murphy — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 17:38:19 +0000

Twitter May Be Coming to Ireland [VIDEO]

Tom Murphy — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:03:45 +0000

New Tech Post welcomes Twitter to Ireland should they decide to come and we point out that there is plenty more opportunities for investment.

A related article you may be interested in reading: Tom McEnery: The Restructuring Of Failure

President Obama visits Facebook [VIDEO]

Tom Murphy — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 14:12:24 +0000

Jim Long on SXSW '11: No Breakout Platforms but Still Worth the Trip

Jim Long — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:06:19 +0000

This was my second tour of South by Southwest Interactive and what I have come to see is a conference whose popularity - the official tally from conference organizers puts event attendance at nearly 20,000 - has engulfed some of its usefulness and value. If you go as an individual, you really have to be strategic with your time there to make it worthwhile, by my estimation.

It’s important here to note here this is “by my estimation”. Your results may have been vastly different than mine. Perhaps if I hadn’t parachuted in mid-conference coming off a grueling overseas work trip, or if I had avoided the lure of the social gatherings and gone head down into some serious panel attendance, my takeaways would’ve been different.

Still, I think to derive value from panels and keynotes you really should fan out in teams and arrive very early. Much of the panel content is duplicative and some panels simply aren’t that good. But there were some quality panels and keynotes, and Patrick Ruffini of Engage communications has outlined four of his favorites.

Face to Face – It’s the People That Make the Conference

The real, measurable value of these conferences is spending time meeting people face to face. Frankly, you could do that without buying a pass to the conference.

While some of the parties and lounges require a badge, you can meet people and do business simply by roaming the lobby of the Hilton or Driskill, or on the main floor of the convention hall. You can always catch the keynotes at SXSW Interactive.

Even with all of this ambient intimacy allowing us to keep tabs one one another – defying time and space – it’s still no substitute for a handshake or a hug. I had the opportunity to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen in years. These meetings produced measurable value professionally, in terms of projects/plans I have in the pipeline, and at a personal level it was lovely to spend time with the folks who mean a lot to me. This is what made the trip worth it for me.

No Breakout Platforms This Year

This was no coming out party for any shiny new technology like there has been for services like Twitter and Foursquare in years past. Venerable Silicon Valley blogger Louis Gray proclaimed Hashable and Foursquare ”winners” of this year's confab, but other than that, there weren’t any real standouts.

Like the title of this post implies, all of these platforms are evolving, and more emphasis is being placed on how people are using these tools – sometimes with wrenching geopolitical implications. If nothing else, this demonstrates the maturity of mobile, social and location based technologies.

Todd Watson from IBM said in a recent post, “For so much of the past 10-15 years, we’ve been so enamored with the technology itself. But more recently, we’ve begun to take much more notice of what the technology can do to empower humanity and human relationships, in often profound and game-changing ways: the Green revolution in Iran, the Haiti earthquake, the Chilean mine, the recent quake/tsunami in Japan…”

Watson adds that all of this technology is forcing organizational change upon institutions. Unable to keep up with the ”speed of the network” governments, businesses and other command and control institutions are increasingly being outpaced by networked individuals. This is an compelling trend that bears watching.

I’m interested in reading ”As One” by Mehrdad Baghai and James Quigley. In it, the authors outline many different types of organizational structures that work toward successful, unified goals. Not the stuff of SXSW party buses, but it looks like a worthwhile read.

The Promise of Web Video at SXSW

I live, eat and breathe video. I’m invigorated by the fact that production, distribution and monetization of video is now within the reach of anyone. A scant few years ago this was the sole realm of broadcast and cable giants. But as with many institutions, the internet has leveled the playing field.

I see great opportunity here and am fascinated by the idea of launching a internet TV network. In one of the more energizing conversations I attended at SXSW, IAC chairman Barry Diller described how this internet “miracle” is disrupting broadcast and cable TV dominance, “Here you have this classic thing… You have a group of people, they’re on the train tracks. The train is five miles away. It used to be 10 miles away. In a year or two it’s going to be a mile away, and they’ll still have their hands out.”

He appeared to be quite bullish on the future of internet television and believes it will be ubiquitous within three years.

Quietly, web video companies are doing something very de classe in the tech world. Many of them are making money instead of just taking money. Call me old fashioned, but I like that. In back-to-back “lightning round” sessions, companies like Howcast and Revision3 touted video ad CPM’s of $9, $15 and even $35. More impressive is the potential for growth in online video. Revision3 Chief Revenue Officer Brad Murphy shared these encouraging projections: (source: eMarketer)

2011 – 68% of US internet users will be watching online video at least once a month
2015 – 76% will be watching online video regularly
2010 – Marketers spent $1.5 billion in online video (up 48% from 2009)
2014 – Expected to grow to $5.7 billion

I sense great opportunity here and was inspired by these sessions. One big disappointment for me this year was that I didn’t get a chance to meet Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback. It’s impossible at something this big to see everyone you would like to, so hopefully our paths will cross soon.

Will You Go Next Year?

I think I’ll go back next year. I’ve got a line on a condo just two blocks away, so at least that part is taken care of. I’d say this SXSW was worth the trip, but as I noted to someone, I didn’t “love” it, I “liked it a lot.”

Special thanks to Jim Long for allowing us to repost this truncated version of his original article which is entitled "Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary – No Breakout Platforms But SXSW ’11 Still Worth the Trip." You can also view some more of his SXSW pictures at flickr.

Storyful: Curating News For A New Generation

Lisa Jackson — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:17:53 +0000

The idea of curation has long been associated with cataloguing collections in libraries and museums. More recently, it also refers to the person who is responsible for picking the artists to perform at a music festival.

In the context of social media, a new concept of the role of the curator is developing. This curator aims to filter the deluge of social media content washing over us every day to edit this and provide context for the interested public.

On average there are 140 million tweets a day and 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. With this swell of information, how does a curator sift through it and catalogue what is valuable, accurate and newsworthy? How is this then built into a digestible story?

These questions led to the creation of Storyful, a website founded by journalists that is dedicated to the curation of the real-time web.

Storyful founder, Mark Little, a journalist with 20 years experience, explains where the idea came from, “My passion has always been foreign reporting and I did a huge amount of it in the nineties. News organisations were spending less money on this and it was becoming far more difficult to get to go to places where there was interesting stories.

“I saw the rise in social media as an opportunity. My role was not necessarily always to travel but was also to find out if we could find the sources that were reputable within this mass, big conversation. It just became so much more important after the Iranian protests in 2009. The big problem was there was no filter.

“The beginning of last year when I set Storyful up, I really had no idea except a hunch how we might do it. Gradually I just met people who shared the same vision.”

In order to create a news story, Storyful finds reputable sources from around the world on YouTube and Twitter. It selects people who are talking about unfolding issues. Many of them are journalists.

“What we do is we work very much to begin with around lists. We believe that every news event creates a community.” Storyful then watches this news community and it effectively becomes a newswire for a particular story.

This creates the content for a story which is then translated into news with added context, insight and information from the Storyful curators who are located in countries including Ireland, China and America. The stories feature a mixture of tweets, maps, video and context drawn together by the curators to promote the depth of understanding around an unfolding news story.

As well as the public element, Storyful also operates a subscription element which has clients including ABC News and YouTube.

“The business is orientated around a private Twitter account called Storyful Pro. Storyful Pro is effectively a newswire.

"What we are is the first news agency designed for the social media age. We built a set of tools and workflows and our clients pay a subscription to get all the material that we find.”

Relying on sources from social media for both the public and private element of Storyful raises questions of reliability. A recent story published on Storyful profiled a man claiming to be dying of cancer who used Reddit to speak of his last hours and answer questions on his illness. Later it emerged that the entire story may have been a hoax.

Does this worry Mark? “Yes, absolutely, but the great thing about it [the Reddit story] was it was Twitter that exposed it. So, from our point of view, in that kind of story what we’re interested in is the way the community itself does the verification. And that’s the next step for us. We can’t just be eight people or twelve people, or whatever we end up being, doing this ourselves. We have to get the community.”

To encourage the wider community to engage with the curation of news, Storyful has just launched a public curation tool.

This curation tool is a customised app that allows the public to curate the news and insert tweets, video and other content. A story can also include paragraphs of text of up to 500 characters. The subject matter can be as diverse as the conflict in Bahrain to star trails.

Mark hopes that this will encourage thousands of people to become involved with the curation of the news.

“Something like this becomes very much more interactive and social. We’d love people to join with us. If they’ve got problems with the way we do things come and join us. Tell us. We’re wide open to people coming in to help. If they’ve got a specialist interest or they have a particular way they want to do it then they can do it themselves, we’ll give them that capacity. That’s the whole point.

“What we eventually hope to be is effectively like the public utility within social media that anybody who is of that 1% who does the important things – tells stories of universal value – they can congregate around our site and around our services.”

The gauntlet has been thrown down to social media users everywhere with an interest in curating stories to engage with news and a news community through Storyful.

Girl Geek Dinners: Connecting Women in Technology

Lisa Jackson — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:05:47 +0000

Picture by Annie Mole

Established in London in August 2005, Girl Geek Dinners (GGD) aims to connect women in the world of technology together in an informal setting.

GGD organises local social events loosely based on a casual dinner party. The events bring women in technology together to chat, network and generally support each other in a professional capacity. At each “dinner" guest speakers are invited to discuss a technical or business subject of interest to the attendees.

GGD founder, Sarah Blow, established the group to counteract her frustration at attending male-dominated technical events. Since its foundation, it has sprung up in 86 cities over 30 countries and is growing month on month.

Some of its newest cities are Cape Town in South Africa, Damascus in Syria and Ticino in Switzerland.

The popularity of GGD has surpassed the expectations of its creator. Sarah says, “It’s progressing at quite a rate. It’s almost three a week, which is quite a lot. It’s definitely growing and at a much faster rate than I expected.”

With the success of GGD, does Sarah still believe that girl geeks are isolated in their profession? “I think the isolation that was there is definitely disappearing. It’s not as prominent in some sectors of IT as it is in others. Specifically in the programming side of things. Wanting to meet with other females who do programming is possible now because of events like GGD.”

Sarah believes that the rise of social media has played a major role in GGD’s success in linking girl geeks worldwide. The concept began as a blog and Sarah believes, “If blogs hadn’t come about it probably wouldn’t have happened.”

From its roots as a blog, Sarah developed her idea further with the help of Facebook and Twitter, “When Facebook started to gain traction it definitely helped things, it made communication between members of the group much quicker and much easier and also made it easier to find people to take over the groups.”

“Twitter has been an interesting one. Twitter has definitely made it easier to reach a wider audience and reach sponsors. Sponsors realise just how effective it is having a message sent out to a community via their community channel. I think that really made it grow quite quickly in terms of numbers turning up to specific events because it gets the word out about the events and it travels around like the speed of light almost.”

Sarah also recommends social media as a tool to aid any girl geeks out there currently looking for work. “Social media is an awesome tool for finding a new job if you use it correctly to be able to profile and showcase your experiences, your expertise but also to find companies that you are interested in. Also, to find people who are actually recruiting in that space. It’s a really useful tool to be able to find other people you are inspired by.”

Men are not excluded from GGD. They are allowed to attend events but only on a direct invitation from a female attendee. This ensures that the maximum amount of male attendees at any one event is 50%.

Sarah says that the reaction by men to GGD has been positive, “The guys that attend the events have opened up to us to develop the community which is one of the things that originally wasn’t natural. The way that people are interacting and reacting is much more positive.

"Guys are now saying - we want more females to come and join our company which is completely different to how it was in 2005. It’s definitely moving in a very positive direction and if it keeps moving in a positive direction I think it can inspire a younger generation into tech.”

GGD is currently working towards two goals. The first is to promote technology in schools with the aim of providing advice to students, teachers and parents. GGD is currently running lectures on an event-by-event basis.

“We’ve done a number of events in London in a couple of schools. We’ve taken inspirational people from the technology industry and put them into the school environment. We‘ve had some of our members as well as the panel of speakers that we’ve put in.”

“The students at the end of it say, we’d always thought that IT was all about Word, Excel and PowerPoint but now we know better. And the teachers say you truly inspired me to actually inspire the students, I now understand what they want.”

The second aim is to establish GGD as a registered charity with the charitable aims of technology, education and women. Sarah sees the ultimate goal of the GGD charity as, "Joining with students, teachers, parents and also people that are actually in business that want to get some support, education and maybe book sponsorships and things like that.”

GGD are currently looking for support in establishing its charitable status in the UK. Sarah explains, “We’ve not actually put the documents forward yet. We’re looking for people that have actually gone through the process of setting up an international charity to help guide us through the process.”

With the continuing growth of GGD as a tool for linking girl geeks worldwide and also the establishment of strong goals for its future, it seems that the GGD tagline – ‘Definitely Does Compute’ – has proven itself to be true.

Rendezvous353: Putting the Social into Social Networks

Conor Harrington — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:57:55 +0000

Rendezvous353, the Irish social network which aims to link Irish people around the globe, celebrates its first year in operation this month. The site was dubbed “The Irish Facebook” on its introduction, and its format was not dissimilar aside from the uniquely irish dimension. However, with Ireland experiencing the highest net outward emigration since the late 1980’s, Rendezvous353 has taken on an increased significance, beyond that of social networking.

One of the founders of the site, Richard O’Donnell, sees comparisons with Facebook as, “nice and complimentary," but sees Rendezvous353 (the 353 refers to the international dialling code for Ireland) as being, “more of a six out of ten Linkedin and a four out of ten Facebook, if you like."

These comparisons are convenient as Richard explains, “If you can give a picture as to what you do in five seconds instead of fifteen seconds or even fifteen minutes, that’s a good thing."

Richard has seen that, with Ireland experiencing severe recession, networking has become more important, especially for those leaving to seek opportunities abroad.

“These days, because of economic circumstances, people are out there trying to do business and looking for opportunities. I suppose it’s not rocket science, is it? You could probably predict it. The jobs side of things is very popular because of the amount of people who are emigrating or looking for work.”

“It’s that Irish thing we’ve been doing since the famine — which is when you turn up in New York and you’ve got a fag packet with ten names on the back you wander around ringing those people. Eventually someone says, ‘you know what, talk to this guy, he might have some work.’ We’ve automated that process.”

Where Rendezvous353 differ from being an Irish Facebook or an Irish Linkedin is in their activity in grassroots community development.

Adopting, “The Wikipedia model, where they’ve got lots of volunteers that are helping with the site," Rendezvous353 has placed ambassadors or “champions” in three key hub destinations for Irish emigrants; London, New York, and the Gulf States.

“What we found was, as people signed up, we could spot the ones that were doing most and were getting most from the site. So we approached three different people, one in the United kingdom, one in the Gulf states in Oman, and one in New York, and we said, ‘look, you’re enjoying the site, would you like to become champions?’ and they have. It allows us to have people on the ground to help those who might be emigrating to those areas.”

Richard has borne in mind his own experience of leaving Ireland. “I emigrated in the eighties to the U.K. and I got everything wrong, it took me three months to get everything right again, but it would have been nice if I could have called up Conor who lived in Hampstead and said ‘How’s it going Conor? I see you’re on Rendezvous353, I’m going to be in London in two weeks time, is there any chance I could buy you a pint and pick your brains?’”

It is activity like this Richard says, which give Rendezvous353 “a bit more depth than other social networking sites out there. We’re not a charity, Rendezvous353 is definitely not a charity. We hope to make money, but there’s more of a benevolence than perhaps other social networks. It’s a try and help if we can model."

Rendezvous353 is still a social network however, “There’s craic involved as well. There was a case before Christmas, where a woman in Singapore came onto Rendezvous353 and said, ‘I’m a bit lonely, I’ve been out here two years, I’ve got three kids, I’d love to meet some people’. So we put her in touch with a few people on the site and now I believe they meet in some coffee shop every Friday, and six of them get together and have a bit of craic. So that’s the nice social side of what we’re doing too. It’s extremely satisfying when you help somebody."

The prominence of the site has been boosted considerably by an association with Ireland.com, who approached Richard and his colleagues in September 2010 with the idea of a partnership. “We’re delighted with the partnership because Ireland.com is a global brand and a household name which also has an association with The Irish Times. It was an obvious fit for us, and there’s a commercial side of it as well insofar as we can endeavour to make some money with them through advertising and various other commercial things we’re doing with them."

With Ireland.com on board, and the network of ambassadors set to be extended in the coming months the agenda of Rendezvous353 will be increasingly dominated by its members as their numbers grow. “It is the members who will dictate which direction you’ll go in. We’re very judicious in our moderation, we just stand back and watch, and it takes its own balance."

New Tech Post: An Introduction

John Breslin — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:43:57 +0000

Hi all,

As many of you may have noticed, we have been going through a process of rebranding over the last week - transforming our identity from socialmedia.net to the New Tech Post.

There were numerous reasons for doing this, and here are just a couple:

Timing: Our readership has been growing steadily, and it was felt that if it was left any longer that it might be too disruptive for too many people.
The name: Social media is still one of our major focuses, and there is still much to learn from the activity in that space. However, we were becoming increasingly aware that more and more of our articles - while still focusing on new and emergent technologies - did not always include as much of a social media aspect or angle that one would expect from a publication with a title like socialmedia.net.

So, instead of trying to force our stories to contain a social media aspect (which it may well contain, but not be totally germane to the narrative), we decided to find a name that reflects the sort of material that a reader would expect to find our pages.

Hence, the New Tech Post. We post stories about new technologies that are coming over the horizon and that may not be necessarily with us yet, but that we think people should be aware of and know about.

We have broken up this remit into five separate classifications: Business, Mobile, Technology, Video, and, of course, Social Media. You can still read all of our stories in the main newsfeed, but you can also check out the channels that are closest to your own interests as well. Hopefully, in the spirit of curiosity, you will check out adjacent channels as well.

We realise change can be disruptive and it can take a little while to familiarise yourself with the unfamiliar, but we hope you like what we have done, and ultimately it will make having New Tech Post as part of your information intake more enjoyable.

John.

Crowdgather: The Importance of Forums on the Internet

Tom Murphy — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 07:41:31 +0000

Sanjay Sabnani is the chairman and CEO of Crowdgather, a network made up of over 65,000 forums generating over 90 million page views per month and 4.5 million visitors a month.

Back around 2005 Sanjay looked at all the press in terms of valuation of user generated content sites and social networks and realized that forums seemed to have very valuable content, very strong ties between the members and really no love from the mainstream community. We asked him why he thought that might be?

“For some reason there seems to be a general reluctance amongst advertisers to advertise on user generated content. You have to message down to the individual and to the small groups. Back in the nineties that was not how it was done. The manufacturers and advertisers wanted to control the message and did not have any dynamic feedback in their approach where they could learn from their users.

“That’s all changed now and we are already started to see traction. We have grown from 12 million page views a month last year to 90 million page views a month.”

But haven’t social media sites subsumed the role of forums?

"There is a substantial difference between forums and social media. At the same time there is a huge amount of ignorance about forums and their place in the eco-system.

"I believe that Twitter and Facebook are the training wheels of the true, deep internet experience.

"On forums most people use imaginary user names. Who you are in the real world, how big your bank balance is, how pretty or handsome you are does not matter on a forum. What matters on a forum is the worth of your intellect, the merit of your thoughts and your ability to communicate them.

"Unfortunately, they are not very pretty. There are legacy issues in how pretty they can be made because of how arcane the software is. But if you look at them for what they are — as vehicles for many to many communication — they are the best applications of many to many interaction.

"Facebook is not many to many. It is me and my friends and at any given time it’s me communicating with my friends or me participating in the communication of my friends. We are never all in it together because I may not have friends that overlap your group of friends.

"Forums are designed for a multiplicity of people to communicate with a multiplicity of people and they are done in an organized fashion with a taxonomy that makes sense.

"If you go to a standard forum you will find an index. There’ll be be a section that has an introduction for new members and a section to put your complaints. You’ll find the subject you are interested in is broken down into various sub-headings. It is very easy to find the information and, specifically, the conversation that you are looking to create or participate in.

"What forums allow you to do is the sum total of everything you can do on the internet.

"On a good forum you can read a review. You can have a member do a tutorial on how to jailbreak a phone or how to hack something. You can have your typical Q&A threads. You can post a question to the community. You can also share. There are very few places that have this aggregate of knowledge.

"Facebook allows you to share social linkages. You see pictures of your friend’s new born child and you get to congratulate them. Linkedin captures your work history; who you have worked with and the chronology of your work experience. Twitter allows you to broadcast to your followers.

"There is nowhere else [besides forums] on the internet where your passions, your hobbies and your knowledge base is sufficiently given credit for."

Apart from being a powerful advocate for forums Sanjay also runs Crowdgather as a business.

"We are focused on what is unique about forums. In the meantime we pursue an acquisition and advertising driven business strategy because in order to get to our dreams we need to have a day job. Get bigger, charge more for ads and give advertisers access to the constituents they are looking for.

"The software that we are developing seeks to expand on this folio and create a system that allows all forums to be interlinked so this history and this collective knowledge base can be better utilized and accessed by the masses that are now cutting their teeth of Twitter and Facebook.

"Forums are highly valued by search engines. You take any other form of social media; you take a blog, you take Facebook, you take Twitter, what is the policing mechanism on the links posted in those types of sites? It’s zero.

"On a forum if you showed up as a new member and in your first several posts there were links to a commercial product you would be ridiculed, insulted, banned and the link would be removed.

"Forums are the only class of site other than Wikipedia type sites that has a built-in peer review mechanism. Search engines have already looked at and identified this process as a very powerful form of curation of good answers. There is a framework of well-understood conduct that you must abide by."

Forums, with their roots in the pre-internet days of networked modems, are the largest repository of high value, user generated content on the internet. Despite their somewhat unfashionable status it is impossible to imagine a worthwhile or particularly useful internet existing without their presence.

Forums might never be cool enough to have movie like "The Social Network" made about them but with people like Sanjay as advocates there is a chance that they might receive a bit more love and respect than they do at present.

Faye Dinsmore: Irish Facebook Phenomenon

Ina O Murchu — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:07:40 +0000

Faye Dinsmore is a graduate of trinity College Dublin and she is now signed to IMG Models, one of the world's top international modelling agencies. She is originally from Ballintra, Donegal and is the youngest of a family of fourteen. Faye now spends her time between Paris, New York and London. She is one of those rare Irish models that have achieved international acclaim.

On the advice of her agency she set up a Facebook Page. Something Faye herself thought to be an incredibly self-obsessed thing to do. She only ever expected to have just a few hundred people 'liking' her but to her surprise the number of fans of her page has just passed 225,000. This makes her, by a considerable margin, the Irish person with the most likes on Facebook.

Just recently, socialmedia.net got the chance to ask Faye about how she managed to become so successful on Facebook.

How much of a user of Facebook were you before you started your fan page?

Basically, I'd started to get a huge number of friend requests on Facebook every day, as well as countless messages from people all over the world, who might have read or seen an editorial or campaign I was in. It seemed like a sensible idea and something a lot of other international models do, so as strange as it felt I started a fanpage and essentially made my personal profile all but invisible. I think for the first 24 hours I only had one fan and that was me.

As regards using Facebook, I was a heavy user of Facebook prior to that. Sadly, I was in Ireland only twice in 2010, so Facebook is really the one and only way I stay in touch with friends back home.

What kind of strategy did you use to get to get such high numbers?

I can't say I had any sort of strategy. I've had an iPad since I started my fanpage, so any time I found a little downtime on set or at a show, I just started posting behind the scenes pictures, sharing interesting articles from fashion websites, doing status updates and so on. I guess some people liked what I was sharing. Eventually I found a Facebook fanpage slightly restrictive so I started a blog which has proven popular.

Sometimes people share posts I do thousands of times. Bit by bit the blog has become more popular outside of fashion capitals. For example, in December more people visited my blog from Dublin, Ireland, than most of Ireland's major fashion magazines have monthly readers. (Over 40,000 people from Dublin alone visited my blog in December).

Finally, I always do my own posts as opposed to one of my agencies in Paris or New York doing them. Oh, and one other thing, I regularly do particular posts for say fans in Colombia or Indonesia or Ireland, posts that you only see if you are in a particular country or even city. I use Google Translate to put a phrase into Indonesian or whatever the language happens to be. I think people really appreciate that.

How meaningful or useful is it to have such a lot of 'friends'?

It has become substantially more meaningful in New York in recent months, and that trend will extend to other fashion capitals in the coming year. So for example, an increasing number of big clothing labels will now specify in a contract with a model that she must also use her Facebook fanpage, if she has one, to promote a given campaign. And for most major international models that's no problem as they all now have Facebook fanpages that they regular update.

How hard is it to manage in terms of hours and effort?What sort of advice would you give to others who wanted to increase their Facebook presence?

I guess I spend on average about 10 minutes a day, maybe less. Advice, me! Mmm... If people are not sharing or liking your content then their friends won't ever come across your page and as a consequence you may find it hard to grow a presence. Just be yourself.

Oh and you've got to have some perspective. What I mean by that is that one hundred fans can be a lot of fans depending on how niche the product or person. A local football club in a particular village appeals to people in that village, say a maximum of 500 people in total. A band or an artist that plays all over the world appeals to a potential audience of hundreds of millions. I may have close to quarter of a million fans, but when you put that in perspective, perhaps it's not that much.

With so many people on Facebook it is difficult to go viral - what in your opinion was the tipping point for you - is it the fact that the industry is so pioneering and so it is either first to market or those with considerable influence will rise up?

I don't know if there has been a tipping point, but instead there are occasional mini tipping points. For example, if you appear in a magazine that is distributed all over South America and Spain in a particular month then you'll get a big increase in fans from these areas. Sometimes, something you post goes somewhat viral, but you can almost never predict that.

Google Analytics & Facebook Fans

Traffic to Faye’s blog from Facebook has reached 40,000 visitors from Dublin alone. Contrast that figure with the number of fans that the Irish publications of Social & Personal - Dublin, Tatler, and Image have - Faye has more likes than all of them combined.

In the world of social media, where high numbers can equal influence which can then equal attention, Faye’s status updates makes her a major influencer in her particular niche in the lucrative world of fashion. They have a reach that surpasses anyone else in Ireland and have a global spread as well.

However, what seems to separate her from other high profile people and organisations is her willingness to not only share her observations and experiences with her audience but to engage with them as well. As always, the key to social media is being social.

Optim.al: Accessing the Facebook API

Tom Murphy — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:42:20 +0000

Facebook is huge. It has over half a billion sign ups and even allowing for dummy and secondary accounts that still leaves a lot of people actively engaged with its service. A good deal of Facebook's potential commercial power is based on the access to personal information that it has obtained from its user profiles and the monitoring of their activities, their likes, their shares, their posts and so on. But even an enormous, well-funded company like Facebook which has the ability throw immense resources at any given challenge realises that it cannot do everything itself.

As Sasha Ziman, Sales Director of Optim.al, puts it, “The notion of the API and the development of relationships with companies such as Optim.al is that they know they don’t have all the answers and so they have invited vendors to try and innovate using their tools.”

Optim.al is a platform where advertisers, big and small, can go on and create campaigns and test a lot of their creative ideas for their Facebook campaign and figure out which creative ideas and variables are the best.

Optim.al is a part of Xa.net which was founded by Rob Leathern who in his own words, "engineered a great deal of multivariate testing and optimization for display ads, emails and text ads at LinkedIn and NexTag and saw an opportunity to extend these methodologies to the rapidly growing and evolving Facebook ad ecosystem."

Optim.al are among the very few Facebook data API partners and they have direct access to the Facebook ad-server. Their multivariant platform tool can substitute for Facebook’s own interface.

The advertiser can give permission to Optim.al to target their connections so they can advertise to them. Or, very neatly, they can advertise to everyone except their connections. They can also reach out to the friends of their connections which for many Facebook users can be a very large group.

The advertisements themselves are broken up into the headline, the body copy, and an image. The primary body text is broken up into two pieces. It was felt that the ‘call to action’ should be dealt with as a sole element and is therefore treated as a variable itself.

Sasha explains further, “[With this creative optimization platform] not only can we test out which ads and parts of ads are doing best but we can also figure out which audience components are successful as well. Not only can you get indications of responses from gender you can also break up the analytics according to their likes and interests.”

The full factorial of options, the multiple and varied ways that and advertisement can be created, combined and recombined can get deep, complicated and unwieldy very quickly. The issue with running every possible combination of an ad is the time and energy that is required to sift the information from the noise.

Fortunately, to help users avoid being overwhelmed there are simpler routes through the system. There are videos available to help with working through the options and it is possible to outsource the entire experimentation to Optim.al itself.

There are a lot of the other platforms which help advertisers manage their Facebook campaigns but this technology which was developed in-house by their own engineers has the ability to give its users insights to improve campaigns that they might otherwise have found very hard to obtain. It enables advertisers to pinpoint what makes their creative work great or not great.

The key here is audience segmentation, audience targeting and really creating ads that resonate with that audience. The power of being able to access a service like Facebook directly is that you have hundreds of millions of people who will tell you exactly who they are and what they like.

Whether Facebook will open its doors further to allow more third parties to have access to their API has yet to be seen. Considering how valuable the social graphs are that it possesses it us unlikely we will see a third-party eco-system that exists around say, Twitter.

However, the willingness of Facebook to allow companies to have direct access to its ad-servers may be indicative of an increasing self-awareness of the limits of its own capability that comes with maturity borne of experience.

socialmedia.net: The Best of 2010

Tom Murphy — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:49:05 +0000

As we approach the end of year break we thought we would take the opportunity to share with you our greatest hits of 2010. We had to apply a weighting system to account for the fact that a lot of our older posts are still being searched for shared and read.

We have also added a little behind the scenes paragraph or two to illustrate various points that might not have been obvious from the original articles. So let's start at the most read first:

Number one: Linked Data: An Introduction

The simple aim of this article is to make the ideas and technology around Linked Data more accessible. The idea of approaching the subject from an imaginary Q&A perspective enabled us to avoid the constant use of acronyms in the main body of the text. (There is a glossary with links at the end.)

We wanted to be able to describe the work that is going in the development of the Semantic Web in as conversational a manner in terms of style as possible. We thought it would be more easily assimilated by the curious and the interested but who perhaps were either not that technically inclined or unfamiliar with this area of technological development.
Number two: Lin Clark On Why Drupal Matters
Lin really saved my bacon the day we did this interview. It was four in the afternoon and all my scheduled interviews for the afternoon had fallen through. On the off-chance I gave her a call and put in a request for an interview and she said, “Sure.” The outcome: A really great interview that required almost no editing.

We are looking forward to interviewing her again in the New Year to talk about Drupal 7.
Number Three: Who's "Most Tweeted" In The Irish Twitterverse?
How can one explain the popularity of this post? “Vanity is All” Ecclesiastes, perhaps.
Number Four: Blaine Cook Introduces Us To Webfinger

Blaine gave a terrific talk at BlogTalk 2010 here in Galway. However, I interviewed him a few days later when he was in England and the connection was not the best. Probably the shoutiest interview ever. Hopefully next time we chat it will be in somewhat more genteel circumstances.

Number Five: Virtual 3D Galway
Probably our find of the year. As I passed by Realsim's office late in the evening I kept seeing Eoghan Quigley working away at his computer. Finally, curiosity got the better of me and I knocked on the door and introduced myself. He showed me what he was doing - creating a Virtual 3D Galway.

What was even more amazing was to discover the years of solid work put in by Gavin Duffy in painstakingly photographing every street, house and building in the central area of town.

Even if you don’t know Galway it is really worth watching the fly-through video.
Number Six: The Virtual World Of Gifted Kids
This was probably the most fun assignment of the year. It was just wonderful to see the children’s response to the virtual world technology adapted and developed by Irish company Daynuv.

It is really worth watching the video in conjunction with the story. In the text you have the adult, grown up story and in the video you have only the children’s perspective. Two different approaches to the same story but they work together very nicely.

NB: The video was shot on an iPhone because I felt the loss in quality was more than made up by removing the distractions that come from having a larger more obtrusive camera.
Number Seven: Number Eight: Interview With John Hartnett: ITLG Brings Silicon Valley To Ireland

John and his team are doing a remarkable job of creating and cementing the links between Ireland and Silicon Valley. The ITLG conference that took place in Limerick in November was very successful in this respect.

It was important to be able to introduce Irish Entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley capital in the form of the visiting VCs. Also, equally important in many ways was the enhanced recognition that ITLG brought for the need to have closer ties between the public sector in the form of research universities and the private sector.

Number Eight: Interview: Cisco's Carlos Dominguez: "Cooperation Is The Killer App"
The interview conducted by Telepresence with Carlos in New Jersey, USA and myself in Galway, Ireland will probably be as close as I’ll ever get to experiencing the holodeck from Star Trek.
Number Nine: "Galway Is A Mini San Francisco": 091 Labs Nurtures Creativity In Another Bay Area
We, at socialmedia.net, are big fans of 091 Labs in Galway. Every town, no matter how big or small, should have something like it. There is no excuse really. People just have to get together, decide what they are going to do and get on with it.

From a coffee table in March, to a fabulous location in June, to being just about sustainable from subscriptions in September - the creation of this hackerspace has to be one of the year’s triumphs.
Number Ten:How To Influence On Twitter: Research Results From New Algorithm Give Guidance http://socialmedia.net/node/144
We would like to thank Bernardo Huberman from HP Labs for really taking the time to explain the research on Twitter that is being done in Palo Alto. From one interview we ended up with three different articles, this being the first in the series.

Number Eleven: Arduino: A Big Revolution In A Small Package
Nobody really knows what the future will hold but it is certain that the Arduino and uses it will be put to will play an ever-increasing role. It allows those with the minimum of technical ability to make really cool ideas possible. It breaks down a very important barrier between having an idea and being able to express it as best as one can.

We are not going to disappear over the holiday period. We will still be posting articles and blogs, just not on a consistent daily basis. Full service should resume very shortly into the New Year.

Mashable: From Social Media Guide to News Titan

Tom Murphy — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:13:52 +0000

Brian Dresher is Director for Business Development at Mashable. Prior to this he was with USA Today for five years where he was responsible for managing social media strategy and digital partnerships. While at USA Today Brian helped to create a content syndication partnership for Mashable content with USA Today which provided a way for USA Today to be able to grow its content inventory and add greater value to its on site visitors and its advertisers.

It was during this period that he was able to see the value that Mashable was able to provide, not only to its existing fan base but also in its ability to tap into mainstream media. He was also able to witness the evolution of Mashable from being a purely social media enterprise into becoming a much broader based media company.

The boundaries between offline and online media no longer seem to be so clearly defined. How do you see the two areas of activity combining?

“It’s fascinating, certainly now that I have been on both sides of that coin so to speak. On the USA Today side, being able to reach out to a younger demographic and really having a deeper connection with other leaders in that space was very important. By syndicating in partnership with Mashable we were able to do this in ways other than by just having a meaningful presence on traditional social networks like Twitter, Facebook and others.

“On the Mashable side it is being able to position ourselves as being a highly credible source of news by partnering with major brands such as USA Today, CNN and Forbes. By doing so we are able to show that these major brands have stated that our content is worthy enough to sit alongside their own proprietary content and that it has value for their audience."

How is Mashable evolving?

“Mashable is now in its sixth year so it is established. Maybe not as established when placed alongside the New York Times. However, relative to many other online publications Mashable is well entrenched and well known for what it has been able to do.

“We are now at the point where we are able to produce thirty unique posts every business day. We still have a hundred percent proprietary content produced. Compare that to traditional media outlets such as USA Today, Washington Post, New York Times and so on who pull in a lot of their posts from third party sources such as AP and Reuters.

"We are certainly bulking up the amount of content to be on a level to be competitive with some of the traditional sites in terms of quantity and quality. Our recent hires who have been brought in from established media brands have been able to introduce some processes, structure and strategy that maybe hadn’t always been part of the DNA here. As Mashable moves into this next stage of growth it helps to bring in some of this seasoned experience.”

“In the same regard we now do our own investigative journalism. We are not going to be sending a journalist to Iraq or Afghanistan to understand what is taking place in those areas. It’s certainly on a different level to that. But we certainly cover what the future of social media and politics looks like. We do a significant number of interviews and research that goes behind putting that type of feature together."

Where is Mashable heading?

“The more we are able to build ourselves up as a media organization the more it just continues to lend further credibility to what we are doing. What we are starting to see is a transformation of perception amongst our audience, and perhaps even with advertisers, that we are not just a blog. We are able to develop content and have access to high profile individuals in the tech space that no one else is able to get.

“Overall we’re of the purpose to make technology, social media, gadgets accessible, embraceable, understandable by various audiences. We certainly have our continued coverage of what HTML 5 means for app developers which certainly won’t appeal to the mass audience. On the other hand we also do reporting on how to leverage Twitter as a customer service tool or how to use Facebook to conduct a job search.

“If you look at those two different types of content pieces, one is HTML 5 which it tech heavy and much more early adopter focused and the other which can apply to a much wider audience because of the ubiquity of Facebook you can see how we are able to reach different types of audience with different types of content.

"We don’t have to be one thing for one group of people. We can be many things to various groups and I think that is what has helped to foster our growth and nurture it by having that type of diversification."

How do you manage for that change?

“We are very mindful about managing the amount of bells and whistles that appear on the site and having to appropriately balance the opportunity for the monetization that may come with adding a new bell or whistle or another type of button that adds another user engagement feature against the user experience and the look and feel of the site. It is something that we are constantly balancing.

“One of my roles at business development is to help facilitate those types of communications within the organisation to make sure that for any new type of opportunity that we have the appropriate input and stakeholders who can say, “This gets a green light from the editorial side for being commensurate with what we produce but maybe it gets a red flag from IT because the page weight might be too heavy and might not load adequately.”

Mashable may have started out as blog produced in Aberdeen, Scotland but with the experience garnered from developing symbiotic relationships with already existing mainstream media outfits it has firmly established itself as a major media player.

Mashable reaches a demography that advertisers crave for, younger people with low commitments and relatively large disposable incomes. Added to that, by hiring experience as well as enthusiasm it is already becoming the online publication of record with regards the coverage of social media and related fields.

Mashable has been doing a lot of the right things in the right way for some time now and it will be interesting to see what lies ahead in the future.

Cisco Quad: A Social Network for the Business Enterprise

Tom Murphy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:11:41 +0000

Quad is Cisco’s enterprise collaboration platform. It is a system where the social tools that are widely used in Facebook and Twitter and other social networks such as; newsfeeds, groups, relationships with friends and followers, contacts and the ability to be able to see activities that other people in our social network are doing, have been adapted to meet the demands of the business world. The emphasis here, however, is more on enterprise than social network.

The social networking capability that we are used to having with Facebook or Twitter has been enabled for integration with the enterprise systems that nearly all businesses have, and which already deal with the demands of CRM systems, document management and numerous other tasks.

Cisco developed Quad because they found that there was a need to provide integration between social networking and the requirement to maintain commercial security and fulfill various legal compliances. It was time to bring social media into the grown-up world. Quad transforms the idea of social network systems from being a fun tool to stay in touch with family and friends to a cutting edge business tool to aid communication and productivity.

Keith Griffin, Lead Architect of the Enterprise Collaboration Platform at Cisco, is based in Galway, Ireland. The Cisco site there is heavily involved in the field of unified communications: the combining of video, audio, instant messaging, online meetings and other collaborative solutions. Using their knowledge and experience, the team in Galway were able to make a large contribution to the work being done on the core development of Quad taking place in San Jose, California.

As Keith explains, “What we are doing here is adding horizontal social interconnectivity to a vertical directory structure. You can see in my profile (pictured above and below) that I have got directory information here. You can see my latest microblog about a research meeting that took place the night before last and my recent blogs and tags which I share with everyone else. If people want to go to this page, they can see all this. It is not just a static web page. It’s a full Web 2.0 environment.

“In the directory, I can see the reporting line. You can see all the people I am following in the directory. If I hover over anybody on the list here, I can see for example that so and so is not following, but this person is. That’s the difference between the 'following' model and the 'friend' model. If both people follow each other they are friends.

“When we did this integration (at one point there was in excess of a hundred thousand people participating,) the social activity was immense. As soon as people could see where they were in the directory and where they related to other people, they started sending friend requests and following requests.

“It just showed to me that vertical integration remains the backbone of the organisation, but it’s of limited value without this horizontal social activity because that represents the interactions that people do in real life, and in the virtual teams they work with, and so on.”

As it was felt that people have a little more to say in the business world, Quad uses 400 characters in its microposts. There is also the ability to have a 'watch list' where a separate filter of the main feed's social activities can be displayed. This can allow the watch list to be used as a de facto to-do list. It gives the user the ability to respond to the news, requests and information that is most pertinent and relevant to them.

How easy does Quad make it to access the vast and varied amount of resources and expertise that a company like Cisco has?

“A big trend that we borrowed from the Web is the concept of social relevance. If I am an expert on something and I offer an opinion or write a blog, that tends to be given a pretty heavy weighting. If someone offers an opinion and perhaps they don’t have a background in a certain area, then it tends to stay as an opinion with a lesser weighting.

"In a social network, because you get to see all the activities, you can see who is active in any particular area. Over time, if people aren’t getting the answers that they expect from somebody who has been represented with having those skills, then in a system like this you would see less social activity associated with those topics for those people. So their relevance and ranking overall can drop.

How is Quad modeled?

“What we have done here is modeled our entire system on people, communities and information. Those are the three dimensions of the system.

“If I search for something like the Semantic Web, which is something we research quite deeply with the people at DERI, it will bring us back a three-dimensional search result. We’re not doing anything special with search, but what we are doing is interpreting the results in the context of social network rather than in the context of a keyword search on a number of documents.

“What it is about is providing a richness of information in any given search."

A natural by product of social activity is the creation of communities. How are they handled?

“When people have a certain interest and that’s an ongoing interest, whether it is a project or it could be a sales campaign or a feature that they are working on, they can set up a community. The community can have a number of owners and contributors. We can have wikis and other Web 2.0 tools of the sort which you would expect, as everything running here is completely within a browser environment.

“Just like on the Web, crowdsourcing in an enterprise is significant as well. It is not just based on the hierarchy of our team. Anybody can come in and contribute their ideas. We use the crowd within our own organisation to get things done.”

While Cisco and companies like Cisco have been using instant messaging technology in preference to emails and telephone conversations for a number of years, particularly in the areas of engineering and software development, there is a major benefit to be had in harnessing one of the real powers of social media - persistence.

Persistence means that a message is kept alive and relevant because it can be seen in the context of its usefulness and relevance by the people engaged with that conversation. Important ideas don’t get lost in emails or are forgotten to be passed on after isolated conversations on telephones.

As it is easier to see the relationship between different messages and their place in the context of activity, it makes it easier to obtain a better perspective on what has already happened, and as a consequence be more appropriately placed to make better decisions about what to do next.

How does Quad help with the issue of time zones in a company as large as Cisco?

“I work an awful lot with San Jose and I am not sure if I could get through my day without Quad. As soon as I come in, I get a snapshot of all my colleagues and all the projects and technologies they are working on.

"It’s not as good as the coffee machine conversation, but I can get a sense of what is going on. The alternative is reading lots and lots of individual emails which doesn’t give me the same context or the same conversational view.”

A tool or a piece of software will only go so far. There has to be a desire for a company to collaborate and want to work together. There is an organisational and business process that needs to happen with this technology as well. Software, as ever, is just a facilitator. It is just something to make things happen. But perhaps when people look at the powerful possibilities that technologies like Quad can offer, it can inspire them to drive the sort of changes needed to enable organisations to work more collaboratively and, hopefully, make things better for everyone.

Social Network Analysis: An Introduction to Measuring How We are Connected

Tom Murphy — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:41:30 +0000

In the article ”Blaine Cook Introduces Us To Webfinger” Blaine suggested that, "Facebook is like a wedding from hell. Because it’s everybody you know and everybody you’ve ever met is just kind of hanging out. And if you were ever in a physical social space that would be like Facebook, it would be the most horrific experience you’ve ever had.” Despite having lists and groups the undifferentiated experience of using Facebook is a definite drawback for many users, myself included.

Most people's lives are made up of involvements in many social groupings. Home, social, and work are probably the three main categories. The relationships within each of these spaces have their own associated considerations, responsibilities and obligations. While there may be a certain amount of overlap there is a distinct tendency to compartmentalize our activities in these different spaces. Having everybody you know lumped together on a social network like Facebook is not reflected in how we conduct our lives in the real world.

However much we make distinctions between the various social sets in our own lives it is still relevant and important to be able to measure how we are all socially connected to the world of people, groups and organisations that are around us and how in turn they are related to us.

In Stanley Milgram’s Small World Experiment we are shown that, for Americans anyway, only six degrees of separation - six other human contacts - separate us from anyone else.

Trying to get a handle on those connections is where Social Network Analysis (SNA) comes in. Originally, a sociological theory it is now a field of practical study with its own tools and techniques to describe our relationships, ties and interdependencies. In addition to its own descriptive terms SNA relies on heavily on graph theory. This is particularly important because once we get beyond our very immediate personal networks it becomes harder and harder to describe our interrelationships in useful ways. Families can use images of family trees to show how siblings, aunts, cousins and so on are related to each other. Businesses use organizational charts to show the deployment of responsibilities. However, beyond these tight knit internal representations can get dense very quickly.

Adding to the processing load are other factors which have to be taken into consideration. Here are just three:

Strength of ties: Not all ties are equal. Some are strong and some weak but weak ties can also have significant influence. A comment from a passing stranger or an unfamiliar speaker at a conference for instance can have effects disproportionate to our familiarity with that person.
Lots of connections in your networks doesn’t necessarily reflect influence: Bernardo Huberman from HP Labs has already shown this in his work on Twitter, ”How To Influence On Twitter: Research Results From New Algorithm Give Guidance.” What matters is where you are along the line between being at the centre of formed groups and cliques and being available to link to the otherwise connected. Being the bridge between a fully networked group and those outside that group is where the power of influence lies.
Vulnerability: Some networks can have a lot of connections to a single point. If that person, group or organisation is no longer available for being connected to it can result in the possible fragmentation and dispersal of the entire network.

An immediate application of SNA is in epidemiology. Being able to model and predict how diseases like HIV/Aids spread is vital for public health planning. Social networking sites can be an absolute gold mine for being able to monitor, measure and quantify people’s relationships.

The information derived from the applications of SNA techniques allows the social network operators to provide a better service and make the experience of the site more meaningful. It also provides useful data that can be used for marketing products and other commercial activities.

SNA applies to either persons or groups and the points where relationships connect are called nodes. In this article, ”Social Network Analysis, a Brief Introduction”, it is pointed out by Valdis Krebs that while all the action may seem to be occurring with those at the centre of a network there are real possibilities for change that come from those at the periphery.

Being less likely to be involved in the comfort zone of homogenous communication in a group other than their own, they can, by their position towards the edge of a group, create the opportunity to bridge one social network with another. These bridging nodes, whether they are individuals, groups, companies and so on are where the potential for the rapid expansions of networks lies.

Social Networks Analysis shows us that our connections are always dynamic in nature and alter in complexion according to how close to the centre or periphery we are in relation to others in our networks.

As social networks influence our lives more and more it will become more and more vital to be able to accurately measure and observe as precisely as possible what is going in that environment.

Weedle: Creating a Fabric of Credibility

Tom Murphy — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 07:45:31 +0000

Iain MacDonald started Weedle with the desire to provide a fundamentally better way of connecting people who have skills to people who need them within a trusted environment. Weedle employs 18 people at present, most of whom are mathematically and software orientated, and has users in over 160 countries. Not bad for a company that is only about a year old.

The origins of Weedle began when Iain needed to solve an arboreal problem at his home. He explains further, “I needed to find somebody who could help me cut down some trees at the bottom of my garden. I spent a bit of time asking my friends and my family if they knew somebody but unfortunately they didn’t. Then I went to Google and I found people who said they were very good tree surgeons but they were strangers to me. I found it very hard to trust them in terms of their competence, their value money, their reliability or their trustworthiness.

“I was pretty sure that the right person was out there. That they were out there looking to connect with me and I’m looking for someone with a skill I need and I am trying to connect with them. But the reality is that it is currently very difficult for us to find each other.”

Iain designed Weedle so that people who are searching for someone with a skill can go beyond just depending on how the suppliers have presented themselves, either via advertising or simply having membership of a professional or trade body. Using social networks as a means of verification there is now a way to assess other factors such as reliability and suitability in terms of being able to work with them.

“When you are looking for a lawyer or someone like that, often when a friend recommends them to you and you end up going to the lawyer they can turn out to be not the sort of person you are looking for. We can circumvent that waste of time by being able to see all the details of the person who has the skill before you contact them.

“What we have is a fabric of credibility. Say, I go to Weedle and I make my skill page. In order to be found when someone searches for me there are a couple of things we take into account in the context of our search algorithm. So, the first one is the content of my skill page and does it match for what someone would be searching for. The next element we take into account is who this person is actually connected to. We may have someone who has created a skill page and is connected to fifty people but they may be less credible then someone who has connected a skills page that maybe only connected to five people.”

How does Weedle compare to Facebook and Linkedin?

“Facebook is very good for communicating with your friends and Linkedin is very good for managing your white-collar network of contacts. But it is not so good if you are looking for a plumber or a carpenter.

“Even if you were looking for a corporate lawyer to float your company on the Nasdaq you’ll get a resume or a some type of CV. What people are really looking for is what projects has he or she been involved in, what role did he play, how long did it take him to do it and to see examples of the expertise that he has.

"It’s not just about say, a yoga teacher who simply states they have worked in ABC Yoga for the last five years. On Weedle you will see; this is where they trained, this is where they worked and here is a video of her giving a yoga class. Here are photographs of the yoga studio, here is a list of ten people that are in your network that went to their class."

How much of a role does Semantic Web technology have in your system?

"It’s really very significant: A lot of sites using search have gone down the hierarchical directory structure route. A person would have to pick from a drop-down box and choose ‘telecom industry’ and then ‘mobile telephony’ and then ‘mobile network.’ It’s very hierachical and pigeon-holes people into specific positions.

"The particular benefit of using a semantic ontology is that we have no hierarchy to the classification of our user skills. If you go on to the site declaring that you are a carpenter then all you need to do is say “I am a carpenter.” We know that we need to present that search result in a population of search results generated when others search for terms like carpenter, woodworker or joiner.

"We can apportion levels of relevance to the skill pages we have versus search strings. Machine learning combined with Semantic Web technology creates a much better user experience."

The underlying idea that determines credibility and trustworthiness both offline and online is social proof. Any claim you may make about yourself personally or professionally is validated, or not, against how you are perceived by your social network. Professional bodies may declare you competent and award you some sort of certification and send you out the door to ply your trade but it is how you handle your day to day dealings that really count for most people.

Iain has come up with a system that allows you to access the layers of social trust that surrounds us all and enables access to the sort of vital information on someone that would only normally become available over time and after, possibly, a number of encounters.

Interview: Krishna De - Perspectives on Having a Social Media Presence

Tom Murphy — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 07:56:42 +0000

Krishna De was a speaker yesterday at the "Turning Online Networking into Real Business" conference organized by HPSU Skillnet. Krishna has been working in the Social Media field for the last six years. Before that she has worked at senior levels with Guinness and Diageo. Her talk was a step by step guide to developing a Social Media laid out as a 30 day strategy to make it convenient to understand and easy to remember.

Krishna has been working in the Social Media since its earliest days and we took the opportunity to ask her how things had changed since she began.

“It’s great to see so many more organizations looking to embrace it and use it. If I look back about three years ago the organizations that were making most use of it were small businesses. One of the reasons we saw smaller organizations use it was very often they had recognized they needed to market their businesses for the recession. They had limited budgets, they didn’t have to have lots of forms of approval to be able to do it. [Social Media platforms] were free and they were easy to use and had a very low barrier for entry.

"Larger organizations at that time, and some still are, were nervous around things like, “What happens if people say negative things about us?” and “Not sure how we get started,” and so on.

"Platforms changed and became easier to use. When things like twitter became available you started to see journalists using it and the media using it and it became more mainstream. That got more people starting to think about it. What we see now is that a lot more organizations use these platforms, embrace them and put them in as part of their communications engagement plans and marketing plans."

Has people’s approach to Social Media changed?

"It’s all about telling a story. I think we are going back to some core roots. There is a lot we can learn from story-telling. That’s what effective communication and marketing is. We remember the stories. I guess some of the people attending today would have remembered the stories today rather than the facts.

"What we need to do is go back to is, "What is the message and what are we trying to communicate and who with and how are we going to make this of interest to other people?" Then, "How might we use these different platforms to be able to do it?"

"The big questions are, "How does this make a difference to my business in terms of my communication, my engagement, my PR or whatever their measures are?"

"I wouldn’t disregard good old traditional media at all and that is why I like to think about Social Media as an integrated three hundred and sixty degree marketing approach because social proof is hugely important. We are influenced by our friends and we are influenced by traditional media. I wouldn’t forget those things. They are hugely important and we should integrate them where we can."

How do you see the things developing and changing in the future?

"I think it is becoming much more simple for us to use these technologies which is fantastic particularly for somebody like me who is not a highly technical person. I think the way we can publish content so quickly and so easily is fantastic.

"There's a few things I see happening. A lot of us have got smartphones now and we can search for information on them. We are kidding ourselves if we don’t consider the web as mobile. From a digital perspective you have to know how your core website renders for people looking at it on a smartphone of some description.

"I think the thing that is going to grow in the year ahead is video. It is becoming easier and easier to do. People will always cite YouTube but there are many other sites you can syndicate your content to and of course host your own content as well.

"Podcasting seems like a forgotten thing but a lot of people do love audio. I can multitask with audio. If I were driving and watching a video I would be in trouble.

"How do we build longer term relationships? If I look further forward there’s a couple of things I would look at like social commerce and social customer relationship management. The smarter companies are already moving into that. Anybody can get a coupon once but they may never come back to you. "How do you build a lifetime relationship with that person?" I think that’s a question for us in terms of marketing, engagement and communication.

"One the areas where Social Media is hugely under utilized is to enable better engagement inside the organization. The first people to use it were the marketeers but now you are starting to see other functions of the organization using it and it is now being linked into the sales processes and so on.

Employee engagement is absolutely critical in terms of making sure your people know what they need to and how to represent your brand. They are your brand as well. I think there’s a huge opportunity to get your organization to be more efficient inside."

You can catch up with more of Krishna's activities at BizGrowth News