Posts Tagged ‘chinwag’
Event: Chinwag Live Xmas futures, Crystal balls
December 3rd, 2008
Last night’s Chinwag event looked ahead to 2013, asking where will we be with digital media, platforms, distribution and user behaviour. If you went hoping for ground-breaking predictions and hot news on emerging innovation you’d have been sorely disappointed - little was said that hasn’t been talked about already.
However, what I found most interesting was discussions around how our hunger for an all-you-can-eat connected world is transforming the way we work, what we think about our privacy, how we build relationships etc. While we (the 30+) are trying our hardest to keep up-to-date and involved, the generation below us are growing up with connectivity being part of their DNA.
“Continuous partial attention“, a term referenced by Chinwag panellist Jamie Coomber, head of digital strategy at Profero, summed up perfectly the environment that those consumed by digital are grappling with on a daily basis. We don’t want to miss anything, and so we’re having to train ourselves to check our Twitter stream, RSS feeds, Facebook updates, wikis etc continually, in a way that isn’t affecting our productivity and concentration.
Our definition of privacy has also shifted - something that I’ve noticed about myself recently. Well-known blogger Neville Hobson who was also on the panel claimed people are becoming more comfortable with sharing personal data, as the benefits of doing so become more enticing. But this trust is misplaced he argued, with the safeguards not yet being in place for us to do this securely.
We are increasingly forging online relationships with like-minded individuals. By 2013 our relationships will be very honed-in, and Jamie Coomber predicted that we’ll have a network for every aspect of our lives and that we’ll adjust our engagement and intimacy from network to network. In addition, Neville Hobson argued we’ll have more choice about who we connect with and when - so for example your collection of ‘friends’ on Facebook will be more clearly segmented based on the area of your life you associate them with.
Open ID was another issue that aroused debate, with the panel agreeing that we’re far from it at present. Connectivity infrastructure, and the prevalence of proprietary systems and applications, emerged as a big trigger of frustration - we want to be able to move from application to application, or network to network, taking one profile with us. While the debate was focused on the future, discussion dwelled on the innovations that have been talked about for the past five years and are technically possible, but are still not happening. Is regulation the only thing that will change this and move us forward?
BT futurologist Jonathan Mitchener made a great summation of the event (not necessarily verbatim): “Innovation brings flexibility, but with it the need to make more decisions about how we work and how we live. We’re not ready to make those decisions yet…”
Moving mobile social networks beyond MySpace and Facebook
November 12th, 2008
A lively time in Wardour Street last night at the Chinwag event on mobile social networks with feisty (and drink-enabled) characters in the audience providing a testing warm up for the expert panel and chair Bena Roberts (GoMo News).
When things settled (departure of character with the Voice of Reason), it soon became clear at the MoSo Rising gathering that while there are no stellar new performers in the space, with established marques like MySpace and FaceBook leading the charge into always-connected social spaces, there are many positive signs.
Right now though start-up and niche mobile-only social networks are wrestling with the best revenue models, with white-label services a winning play at the moment, as ads and subscriptions largely fail to deliver.
More pressing for many agencies and PRs on the night was the need for clarity on how best to advise companies interested but fearful of mobile/social web. Panellist Alfie Dennen, CEO Moblog, suggested that brands and agencies need to think in more inclusive way, and embrace mobile as part of the communications mix, in much the same way that broadcasters have.
Harry Blunden. Head of digital at ?WhatIf! Digital advised that all agencies
should have at least one mobile savant - the one who could read the current mobile terrain and map out the potential for clients. He and other panel members all felt that many agencies did not understand Mobile but needed to embrace it.
Ron Shelton. CEO Next2Friends also urged agencies to encourage client to experiment with Mobile now, educating them away from the fear of the platform.
The view from the panellists, not necessarily shared by everyone in the Slug and Lettuce, was that digital agencies don’t yet get the mobile space and that a focussed education programme was needed to pull agencies into the new age with clients still very reluctant to put money into mobile.
A positive view on the development of the mobile/social web came from the floor as Conor McKenna, business development manager at mobile search company Taptu who said that growing numbers of people leading quite disconnected working lives used mobile web and social networks to communicate and engage and as a form of escapism.
Bena Roberts added how Polish workers she had met were addicted to social networks on mobile as this was all they had to keep connected with their social groups.
And in Hungary, people in villages who had not heard of broadband were using their mobiles as web/social media access tools.
The key messages I took away from a thoughtful evening were that MoSo is only just starting as is going to be a greater part of the mobile, always connected web with massive opportunities for all the players: operators, service providers, brands and agencies. While “always on” mobile is maybe 5-10 years away, there are great opportunities for brands to engage with their customers and for agencies to build business.
At the moment, brands can harness Mobile by playing to its current strengths, keeping it simple and direct but also thinking creatively about how to use the at present limited functionality. It’s not just about delivering ads and brand messages one way.
And the simple questions for agencies and brands to ask around Mobile: “What do we want users to do? How do we create real value that engages?”
Chinwag Live: Search versus Recommendation a no-brainer debate
September 3rd, 2008
Last night’s Chinwag Live: Search v. Recommendation event was not the packed out, sweaty debacle that it usually is. My hunch is the motion of the debate was not as sexy as widgets or social media measurement, and was also pretty much a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, there’s not much of a case that can be made to suggest recommendation/review sites will win out over super beast Google (the ‘search’ side of the argument quickly became a Google one - pointed out by a heckler who commented “let’s get off Google’s dick!”).
With that in mind, there was little debating going on, but some interesting points were made about recommendation sites from a B2C point of view - interestingly no one brought up the role they can play within a B2B audience. To summarise:
- Only a fraction of a percentage of internet users add ‘+review’ to their search phrase - something that I was very surprised about as I do it all the time! I’d be interested to see more detailed stats on how search linguistics change between searching for specific information, and searching for inspiration or trusted reviews.
- Recommendation sites know very little about their active reviewers at the moment, and it was agreed that this detail is currently difficult to obtain. Panelist Walid Al Saqqaf, co-founder & COO of TrustedPlaces admitted that only 17% of his registered users write reviews, while a “much smaller” percentage of unregistered users are active reviewers.
- YouTube is becoming a popular destination for searching for reviews, particularly for mobile phones and digital cameras, and has the potential to overtake written review sites in the future.
- Twitter is also increasingly being used for micro-reviews.
- It is currently very difficult to measure reviewer intent across recommendation sites, which is limiting their usefulness and relevancy. According to Chinwag panelist Lisa Ditlefsen, Head of Search at Base One, Microsoft is currently looking to limit the number of review sites that rank in natural search rankings.
- People are generally more happy to give out personal information about themselves on social networks such as Facebook and Bebo, than on review websites such as Tripadvisor. The networking opportunity, from a business or personal perspective, is a key aspect that review websites need to tap into.
A good review of the event is also available on The Crowdstorm blog.
Social media tools list - from analytics to Digg
February 20th, 2008
After recently attending the Chinwag: measuring social media event, I wanted to share with you some of the hundreds of mostly free measurement, tracking, conversation, monitoring tools and so on that are out there and widely available. All of which can be found on our archived research page , which is there for all to use to better understand social media and related subjects.
The first link is a Mashables page where you will find tools for web traffic visualisation, blog and RSS feed analysis, market research data and site rankings, analytics software packages and log file analysis.
The next link is 26 must-have buzz monitoring tools, all of which are free of charge.
For the PR readers of the blog here are some tools for you that have been tried and tested by PR consultant David Jones.
If you are a big fan of DEL.ICIO.US as we are here at Liberate, here’s another one for you. The ultimate DEL.ICIO.US TOOLBOX - over 180 DEL.ICIO.US tools to use. Check out our own bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/liberatemedia
By now you should all be digging and submitting story you like to Digg. To keep on top of it all here is a Digg tools and resource page.
If that wasn’t enough for you here’s 70 more Digg tools.
Want to track your website? Well you should! On this page there are 69 tools to do just that.
If you just want to concentrate on blogs here are some tracking tools and six key ways to measure it.
If you have a found a discussion in the bloggosphere and you want to follow it try one of the following tools.
Twitter is very popular at the moment and numbers 4 and 5 in this blog post will help you monitor conversations and visualisation.
More reputation and social media tactics tools can be be found in our rescource.
If you would like to add to our resource or think we might have missed some important tools please get in touch.
Chinwag: the length isn’t in measurement yet
February 19th, 2008
Last night’s Chinwag Live event was all about measuring the effectiveness of social media - a brave subject matter, bearing in mind that many are still getting to grips with what social media is, let alone grasping the new metrics associated with it.
Sitting on the panel were Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at research firm Nielsen Online, Robin Grant from word-of-mouth agency 1000heads, Will McInnes, MD of social media agency Nixon McInnes, and Ankur Shah of data-driven measurement company Techlightenment. The panel was chaired by a big name within web analytics - Jim Sterne.
As a first observation, I found it disappointing that there was not a better balance of communications experts on the panel. Granted, measurement often goes hand in hand with technology and data collection, but monitoring is equally as important in social media and far more the realm of communicators. Although Ankur and Alex put forward their very best case for technolgy being the answer to everything, I remain unconvinced that in this early stage in social media, technology is able to accurately interpret emotion, tone, and to a certain extent the unsaid.
A pertinent observation by Jim Sterne was “getting humans to agree on language is almost impossible”. If that’s the case, how on earth can we expect computers to. In Will McInnes’ words: “humans are slow, and computers are dumb”.
If I’m honest, I came away thinking that I hadn’t learnt as much as I’d hoped to, and this sentiment seemed to be shared by other people in the audience. A Tweetscan last night for ‘chinwag’ was very telling - a lot of passive observations, but nothing ground-breaking or inspiring being shared.
One hypothesis for the night had been the notion of establishing industry-wide agreement on measurement standards. This wasn’t discussed in great depth, but there seemed to be a reluctance to address the concept and debate how it could work. This underlined my major disappointment with the evening - that being that everyone was talking from their own individual agendas. While social media is inherently about honesty and openness, the data experts were keeping their cards very close to their chests, and not so willing to reach conscensus on anything. While I appreciate this was a discussion, it would have been nice to see more willingness for collaboration, from an industry operating at the heart of social media.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.