This week I'll be going along to some of the protest marches being organised in London in response to the world's leaders gathering in London this week for the G20 summit. I went along to the peaceful Put People First march from Embankment to Hyde Park over the weekend, and plan to tag along with the more radical group G20 Meltdown on Wednesday and Thursday this week. I'll also be checking out the happenings at Climate Camp, and look forward to speaking with some of the participants about what is on their minds.
You are welcome to follow my updates from the week via Twitter @lisadevaney -- and I'll also be posting my observations over on citizen journalist website DigitalJournal.com.
Read my G20 coverage to date here:
London Braces for G20 Protests Next Week
Day 1 of G20 Protests More Gandhi Than Rambo
I'll also plan to pop into Brand Republic to report any interesting happenings when I get a chance.
If there are specific questions or activities you would like me to take quick peeks into, please send me a Twitter @lisadevaney, or email me at:
lisa@haimediagroup.com
Marching along with thousands of others this week,
-Lisa
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Today hundreds of bloggers around the world are celebrating Ada Lovelace Day by writing about women they admire in technology. Whether they be famous or just a friend or family member, the tributes are popping up all over the internet.
Here's a collection of a few women in technology I find inspirational:
Esther Dyson -- One of the female leaders who have shaped the internet.
Rachel Carson -- Biologist and environmentalist who is the author of Silent Spring.
Heather Luttrell -- President of online advertising company IndieClick.com.
Sarah Platt -- Web TV expert and head of Kinura.com.
Barbara Anglisz -- Product Direcctor of Adept Technologies.
Katz Kiely -- Head of interactive agency Just-b.
Jemima Kiss -- Technology journalist for The Guardian.
Aleks Krotoski -- Academic and technology journalist for The Guardian.
Mena Trott -- Founder of Six Apart, Moveable Type and TypePad.
Helen Keegan -- Mobile marketing expert and Technokitten.com blogger.
Hedy Lamarr -- Actress and early visionary for wireless communications technology.
Deirdre Molloy -- Editor and Events Manager of Chinwag.com.
Courtney Pulitzer -- A networking facilitator between technology, art and charity professionals.
Florence Nightingale -- wartime nurse who discovered poor hygenic conditions caused infection.
Ruth Fisher Rosevear -- My grandmother, who was one of the first female graduates of chemistry from Cornell University.
And there are many, many more.
Happy Ada Lovelace Day,
Hedy Lamarr
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Likely to be one of the more mind-bendingly spectacular performances of the year in London, Martyn Ware, the founding member of 80s bands The Human League and Heaven 17, brings his Future of Sound/Future of Light event to Goldsmiths College in London next week on Tuesday, 24 March.
Martyn Ware
On the bill are animated rock band The Sancho Plan, body>data>space, Tal Rosner United Visual Artists, Scanner, Sophie Clements and Andy Cameron.
The event promises to be part presentation, part performance, and part audience interaction, and will explore the future of experiential art and sound. A production of Illustrious, which is Ware’s creative venture with Vince Clarke, the co-founder of Yazoo and Erasure, guests will be treated to an evening of ambient compositions, piped through a ground breaking 3D surround sound system capable of transforming a conventional room into a sports stadium or a concert hall into a cubicle.
"This is the holy grail of audio; 3D sonic imaging that challenges audiences to embrace a new take on experiencing sound," Ware said.
The event includes an afternoon symposium from 2pm - 6pm at Goldsmiths College Media Resources Building.
Both events are free, but to assure your place, email your RSVP to z.arabadji@gold.ac.uk
Listening to the future,
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News inside the mobile industry is that one of its information centrepieces, the blog Mobile Industry Review (MIR) is taking its content to a subscription-only business model, and will offer no more free content from March 27th onward.
The volunteer run site has provided the mobile industry with daily packed content, including podcasts, beginning as its original title SMS Text News since January 2006, and is the branchild of entrepreneur Ewan McLeod.
McLeod reports that hustling to keep the site running, with up to 400,000 visitors daily, is a costly operation that requires funding of about £20K per year that he has been financing independently. He's welcoming the new corporate angel that has stepped into buy MIR's content, and provide it to others, for annual subscriptions of £12K per year. MIR's content model will be transformed into an industry research resource, beginning with the upcoming April mobile trade show CTIA in Las Vegas.
"I've done a lot of work around trying to work out a model for covering the cost of bringing MIR to you every month. I failed -- it didn't work. I'm delighted that one company put its money where it's mouth is and said 'yes, please'. The fact that they choose to demand exclusivity is just the way it goes. They're entitled to do so. They're paying," commented McLeod.
Always the entrepreneur McLeod is also raising capital by selling Twitter followers for $100 a month.
Good luck Ewan,
Last night, as a guest speaker at The Future Laboratory's idea networking event, I had the opportunity to chat about who is doing what in social media, and the pros and cons of big brand's moves into the social media space.
Love it or hate it, with Facebook fast approaching 200 million users worldwide and Twitter adding thousands of new members daily, not to mention the popularity already established with platforms such as Linkedin, YouTube, Flickr and MySpace, the social media channel of influence can make or break a brand. Discussed was the fear factor that big brands have now toward the social media monster, and the question of whether to enter the arena, or stay out, for fear of losing control of a brand. As The Future Laboratory's mission is to look ahead and keep ahead of the curve, my counsel last night was that big brands need to define social media strategy now, rather than wait for a point in time when they may have to be re-active rather than pro-active toward the medium.
Whether it is a comprehensive strategic plan to making a brand's presence known among social media channels, or a short-term experiment into the space, such as a contest or other promotional campaign, brand's need be bold and step into this brave new world where consumers are hanging out and, in some cases, stirring their own little revolutions. In considering a few examples we discussed:
Mars recent campaign for its Skittles candy, a courageous approach that saw the website homepage transformed to showcase the brand's live streaming Twitter feed along with its Facebook, Flickr and YouTube pages. Usage triggered was so high for this campaign that at one point Twitter crashed, and the brand discovered that turning things over to consumers opens up to a challenge when not everyone played nice with the Tweets they sent along. In the end, the fantastic publicity received around the experiment, has made Skittles top of mind and won new enthusiasts for the brand, even if there has been a bit of brusing.
Comcast, an American cable and broadband provider, has been using Twitter to supplement customer service responses. They've posted a guy named Frank Eliason to man the Twitter customer service site, positively giving a corporate brand a real human being to interact with in real time. Customers simply Tweet their queries to @Comcastcares and quickly receive response.
Other big brands that are stepping into social media with a variety of approaches include: Dell, Starbucks, JetBlue, TheHomeDepot, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market, HRBlock, Best Buy, Popeyes, Forrester Research, Ford, Samsung and Kodak, to name a few.
Here's a few quick tips I shared with folks last night in thinking about approaching social media for a brand:
Be Seen: What do you look like to your social media audience? Are you human, or are you something off a shelf? People want to see other people in the world of social networking so in reaching out to your audiences pay attention to showing them what you and your team look like. Upload images to your Facebook group of your brand in action -- people at events, people using your products, people in your office. Use Flickr to build an image trail of both products and people. Use YouTube to seed videos, integrating several visual tools to showcase the human side of your brand.
Be Real: Don't piss off your audiences by engaging in blatant heavy promotional use of Twitter, Facebook or other social networking sites. Show a personality and offer up a variety of information to your audience, pointing them to helpful or quirky items.
Be Brave: This is new territory for brand building, and it takes an adventurous sort to take some risks in approaching social media. Think out common sense approaches to using social networking for your brand, and don't be afraid to experiment out there.
Be On It: Assign a member of your team, or several, to be monitoring and watching for responses that come back via Tweets, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr comments, and blogs. Response to people's comments should be swift and effective, helping those with complaints and thanking those with praise.
Be Interactive: It isn't enough to hang up a billboard in Second Life or set up a Facebook group or Twitter account, unless you think out how your approach should interact with people. Think about what you can offer up to your audience that will be of interest and relevance to your brand. Can you host a virtual conference in Second Life with prominent speakers? Can you run a contest through Twitter? One company called Going.com created one of the most popular Facebook applications called Naughty Gifts, a slightly cheeky way to give adult gifts to your friends, that has produced millions of exchanges. To promote Going.com, they took the popularity offline and held adult-themed parties throughout America, promoting the events through the Naughty Gifts Facebook application.
For more about future branding trends, sign up for The Future Laboratory's Lifestyle News Network (LSN).
Thinking about social media branding,
Brave Brands With Social Media Strategy:
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Conversation and networking will turn an eye toward the future of using social media for branding tonight with The Future Laboratory hosting a gathering that will introduce some of their clients to a selection of speakers who have expertise in reaching audiences through new methods of engagement.
I'm thrilled to be joining the impressive line-up of speaking guests to help shed some insight on how brands should be thinking about approaching the social media landscape. On the panel tonight include:
The Future Laboratory also publishes trend forecasting resource LSN Global, and keeps agencies and brands current on the latest emerging trends from across the world.
Looking forward to being in the future lab,
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Over on Jamie Burke's blog, a conversation has been sparked about who's who among female social media experts in the UK, and the result is that this week a contest he's initiated will elect five women as the UK's top social media gurus.
The idea got started when Brand Republic's editor Gordon MacMillan put out a request on Twitter asking for suggestions for female social media speakers for an upcoming conference, and Jamie and I helped suss out who people think the top women in social media are. So far more than 20 women have been named to the list, which will be voted on this Thursday, 12 March 2009.
Picks so far include Suw Charman-Anderson, Aleks Krotoski, Laura Oliver and Joanna Shields.
The winners will be invited to offer a 20 minute presentation that will be held as a charity event to raise money for Macmillans.
Cast your vote or pitch in your tips for who the top female social media experts are this week here, or on Jamie's blog post.
Jamie is also the creator of a social media networking forum for PR professionals called the P2PR network, where a lot of conversations get started.
Making my social media guru picks,
Suw Charman-Anderson
Aleks Krotoski
Joanna Shields
Tonight I was hoping to write up a sneak preview of Charlie Brooker's 'So Wrong It's Right' new Radio 4 show that was being taped in studio, but the show was overbooked by SRO and many of his fans were turned away at the door, despite having tickets in hand. So wrong!
I was really looking forward to an evening with him as comedy host of a panel of guests. The show promises to be a celebration of failure, in which "Charlie plunders his guests' pasts, creativity and general knowledge over a series of rounds in which panellists have to be wrong to be right."
Brooker is a guilty pleasure of mine, as his winge and whine television shows and column in The Guardian seem to state bluntly and without forgiveness what you may have been secretly thinking all along. Cheeky, and a dark pessimist who has been given a speaker's platform, his formula of insults to the status quo and his twisted observances of life around us somehow make it a lot easier to take.
Oh well, that leaves me to read about the show's taping on his Twitter feed, listen to it on Radio 4 and envy those who did manage to get into the show tonight.
Being a cranky fan,
Kinetica Art Fair 2009 was a one-of-a-kind exhibition that introduced the UK to a collection of artists who have taken sculpture, electronic arts and robotics to new extremes in a three-day weekend event featuring 150 exhibiting and performing artists. On view and to touch and play with were gigantic, and desktop size, mobile artworks, moving pieces that made you laugh, or in some cases feel slightly disturbed, and light fantastic artworks splashed out across the P3 gallery space.
Favourite works on view included:
Tim Lewis's "Pony", a robot pet that moved about the floor giving curious glances to passersby.
Peter Sedgley's luminescent light piece, presenting transformative, moving colour contained in a round disk.
Chris O'Shea and Cinimod Studio's Beacon, a playful sensory floor display of emergency traffic lights that follow people as they walk about the room.
Giles Walker's kinetically kinky pole dancing robots.
Alistair Burleigh and Alise Piebalga's Labyrinths, showing projected image on cubes.
Michael Markert's k2.1 Talking Machine that communicates as people mainipulate their hands around the piece.
Cybersonica Social Sunday night's performances featuring Bathysphere, Ryan Jordan, Kristy VC, Oddscene, Steve Nosurname, Threep and Vent Media.
Still in motion,
Lisa Devaney
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Last login: 16 Nov 2009
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