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I have been invited to no less than a dozen seminars, training courses and conferences about social media in the last month or so. In case you didn’t know, social media marketing is quite hot at the moment! Having presented on blogging for business since 2002, before this stuff got its own shows, and even mooted the death of market research in 2006 , it’s fascinating to see how quickly people cut and paste together their own position on this stuff. One glaring betrayal of the ‘social media practices’ that have only recently assembled their facade is their ignorance of the power of listening. They will tell you just how they will be your voice on the social Web, but too rarely do they volunteer to proxy your ears. Listening to one person isn’t easy; active listening is a discipline. Imagine then trying to find, tap into and track one hundred conversations, a thousand, ten thousand; and interpretting this information… turning it into knowledge that informs your marketing strategy and tactics. Social Web Analytics This forms a large part of what we call social Web analytics. We define this as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking (listening) and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence. ...

Nominet is running their Best Practice Challenge for the second year. The awards recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse and open Internet experience. The six award categories for 2008 are: Best development project Best security initiative Raising industry standards Personal safety online Internet for all Open Internet If you think your organisation, or your client’s, should be recognised for leadership in any of these categories, you have until 25th April 2008 to get your entry in ! Winners and runners-up get some significant international exposure feeding in to the UN’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the newly formed UKIGF. ...

I’ve signed up and will let you know what I find when I’m allowed in! From their press release today… Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com? Spam free, social search Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering. Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole. Powerful search language and tech plan Digg Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways. But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next! UPDATE Well I’ve got my invite and I’ve logged in to take a look. ...

We’ve come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries . But what is broadband, and where are we going from here? To quote Connect’s excellent report “Connecting Britain’s Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband ”: So what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly: narrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access. Over sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry… the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK. ...

The third convergence conversation of 2008 will look at the impact that new bandwidth intensive services are placing on the UK’s broadband infrastructure. I’m delighted to be chairing the event, and we’ll kick off with the following speakers: Angus Flett - BT Wholesale Geoffrey Spencer - Nortel Antony Walker - Broadband Stakeholder Group Bill Gash - Partners in TV Mike Aigner - Geo Networks Chris Barraclough - STL Partners What’s the topic? Recent rumblings from ISPs have highlighted the fact that new bandwidth intensive on demand services are placing an enormous strain on ISPs’ “all you can eat” business model. The BBC’s iPlayer alone has already enjoyed rapid uptake with over 17 million programmes streamed or downloaded in the first seven weeks following its Christmas day launch. ...

Despite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R’s are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these. (OK, I’m not talking about them, I am actually writing and that irony isn’t lost on me. But then I am future gazing, and I could after all have podcast this post.) Reading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say the foundation, and it is only relatively recently that they have had competition as a media for non-synchronous communication. The 20th Century triumphs of broadcast radio, broadcast TV and semiotics compensated slightly for an individual’s illiteracy, but they were far from a perfect substitute and entirely useless when that individual wished to communicate back. The 21st Century hasn’t taken long however to present a cornucopia of communication possibilities. Whilst applications of the Internet were dominated just a few years ago by text, and lots and lots of it, new applications pivot massively around the audio-visual. “Radio” and “TV” over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing… ...

When does advertising pay? Apparently, we’re getting closer to knowing courtesy of Microsoft. The advancement from paying for eyeballs (CPM – cost per thousand times an ad is shown) to paying for click-throughs (CPC – cost per click), appeared at the time to be the ad industry’s nirvana. And then came click-fraud and CPA. Now if only ‘A’ stood for Acquisition, then we could all go home. Pay £1 ad cost every time you acquire a new customer for your new £50 gizmo (ie, a sale), and advertising becomes a predictable and precisely quantified cost of sale. In this instance, 2% exactly; not 1.9% nor 2.1%. But that ‘A’ means Action, and that Action may be an acquisition, but more generally it refers to getting a prospect to fill out a form, leave their contact details, sign up for a newsletter, etc. Mmmm, still as much an art as a science then. ...

I’m obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing? Future mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like Mobile Acuity interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!? ...

The second convergence conversation of 2008 will be on the potential impact of converging technologies on education. What’s being talked about? Jim Knight, the schools’ minister, recently announced that he wanted to allow parents to access ‘frequently-updated information on children’s achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs wherever, whenever parents want, using password-protected, secure, online systems’. Here then is the potential impact of convergence on the delivery of education. ...

As promised, here’s the links relevant to all the stuff we discussed on Friday at the Away Day: ...