blogtalk 2010

Videos From BlogTalk 2010 Available For Viewing

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Click on image to access videos.

The videos from last week’s BlogTalk 2010 are now available for viewing at DERI, NUI Galway’s vimeo site.

For those of you who for one reason or another were unable to attend, this is a great opportunity to see the variety of speakers from different areas and disciplines, and to appreciate the range of subjects covered.

For those who did manage to attend, this is another chance to revisit a favourite part of the two-day event or double check on what a speaker really said in case you missed it the first time around.

A special thanks to a group of volunteers from DERI who took turns tending the camera so nothing was missed and then handled the post-production processes.

Highlights From BlogTalk 2010: Day Two

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Ruairí McKiernan speaking at BlogTalk 2010.

The second day of the conference proved just as valuable as the first, starting with Stowe Boyd talking us through his “web of flow” theory and how it is all about the streams.

He was followed by Ruairí McKiernan inspiring the crowd with the story of SpunOut.ie. Fergus Hurley talked about his experiences doing business in Silicon Valley and Laurent Walter Goix spoke of bringing it back to “context” from a telecoms perspective. Ronan Skehill outlined how “Apps Are Bad”, and after a healthy debate around this idea we went to lunch.

Perhaps one of my favourite sessions from the conference was Deanna Lee‘s talk about engagement and The New York Public Library.

Various other presentations filled the afternoon; but again the highlight of the day was the panel discussion on location-based social networks.

Location-Based Social Networking Panel Discussion

The panel discussion was one of great interest for those of us who live in Ireland as it seems we are the only ones in the country who seem to be using location-based devices so far. Equally important is the impact such technology has on our behaviour.

Mark Cahill led the discussion, walking us through the various location based networks: Foursquare, of course, WeePlaces.com, Google Latitude, Gowalla, Plancast, and now Facebook Places. Mark put it very simply: it’s about relevance and if you’re in the right place, right time… that’s relevant.

Fergus Hurley outlined that despite the launch of Facebook Places, Foursquare still has potential due to it’s gaming elements. I’d have to agree, considering this is the appeal that it also has for me at the moment. But I think what we needed to contemplate was what would be the motivation for “checking in”? Fergus also touched on this when he said that he thought people would check in somewhere that they wanted other people to know about. Say for example, me checking in when in Spain while I was on holiday to remind everyone that I was somewhere sunny and when they were probably stuck in the Irish rain!

A debate ensued about the behaviour from one generation to another (and how “generations” may not mean years now but months) and that younger generations will adapt to sharing where they are at all times. Only question left to answer is which one of the networks will be king. It seemed Facebook was the popular, but very unpopular, choice for most.

We Should All Support SpunOut.ie

Ruairí McKiernan spoke about SpunOut.ie in one of the morning slots, and I think most of the BlogTalk crowd learned a thing or two about social media for non-profit organisations. The organisation is using social media to activate the young people in Ireland, to inform and engage them with a number of different issues or challenges they face.

What we can learn from their case study? Always involve your target audience. SpunOut.ie wants to engage young people, so they have young people on the board and involved in making key decisions for the organisation. And remember to learn from one market to another. Use social media to share ideas and learnings but remember to bring it back to your local audience.

Clixtr Presented By Fergus Hurley

He walked us through what it takes to go from Galway to Silicon Valley. His network, Clixtr, is one that I admit to not hearing about before the conference and will certainly use now in the future. His presentation had a lot of great resources so looking forward to getting the slides. He also gave us a sneak peak at Picbounce which appears to be a faster version of uploading your pictures to sites like Twitter.

Engagement Is Key From NYPL

Deanna Lee of The New York Public Library gave us a great presentation on how she has seen success in the social space. The title of her presentation “Communications 2.0″ is something that stuck with me, because she made the point that while the rest of us have moved on to Web 3.0 and beyond, for institutions and corportations, many of them are still stuck in 2.0.

I would agree that this is the challenge from a marketing perspective that we face all the time. Consumers have advanced their behaviour; but organisations are still fearful of diving head first into this space. The key point from the presentation was that we have to think about ways for our content to stand out. We cannot live by the “build it and they will come” motto, as social media is about being proactive. We have to create new ways to be noticed in the sea of content.

She referred us back to the “basics of storytelling” and to always be relevant. She gave us a lot of great examples of what makes content stand out like Ghostbusters in the NYPL or Tillman the skateboarding dog. As someone who has always been a fan of the library, she was able to draw on this favourably disposed emotion by making the NYPL’s campaign not a brand’s campaign but a people’s campaign.

Additional Points Worth Noting?

In addition to the highlights featured above, there were several presentations that sparked intrigue and got me thinking about all of the things I now have to follow up on! Some of them have been noted here below, but would love for others to add some of their highlights!

Consider The Six Degrees Of Collaboration And Apply To Your LinkedIn Strategy

Ted Vickey presented his thoughts on the power of LinkedIn and outlined several ways he has used the network to build his own network and others. Reach out to your network on LinkedIn and source contacts that can help you provide solutions to problems.

How Often Do We Ask Ourselves “Who Am I?” When Thinking About How We Are Presented In Our Social Profiles Online

Gabriela Avram, University of Limerick and Brian O’Donovan, IBM presented their academic observations about social identity construction. They outlined IBM’s internal social network, BluePages, as an example for their research. They pointed out that internal social networks are used with promotion in mind. Their slides definitely provided some food for thought.

A really interesting perspective was provided by Dr. Werner Breitfuss of Hypios, who presented his company’s “problem solving” platform that really shows the power of social media for our future. In my basic understanding of his product, Hypios helps people find experts with social media. If you have a problem that needs a solution, source the people that know the answers best. Take his Kraft example, where a small restaurant in Italy ended up providing the answer to something that Kraft was trying to solve on their own. The small restaurant was found using social media.

I haven’t commented on Ronan Skehill’s argument for why “Apps Are Bad” because I’m afraid I’d need to do a bit of research before I would be able to participate in that debate! His presentation did prove valuable in providing us with key stats about the future of native apps vs. web apps, and really drilled down the growth in this area. I had heard about Android’s growth, but didn’t realise that they had increased market share from 2% to 10% from Q1 2009 to Q1 2010.

Laurent Walter Goix of Telecom Italia was able to give us insight into our changing social behaviour from a mobile network’s perspective. His presentation was all about context. He outlined that we must always be “context aware,” considering the where, when, how, by what, and by which network? With this context awareness, there will a new role for telcos, whereby they may become the “context sensors” for the data we share and consume across the mobile social web. He also pointed out the importance of filtering content on your mobile due to the small display screens on mobile devices.

All in all, the conference was really valuable for a social media marketer/enthusiast due to its fresh perspective in speakers, as mentioned in my post about BlogTalk 2010 day one! From someone looking at social media with my brand and organisation hat on, it was useful to think about the technology behind what makes social networks work. The debates about the future of social media left us all buzzing. I look forward to staying in touch with those that myself and Aoife Murphy of Radical met along the way; as well as keeping up to speed on the blogs, videos and opinions shared from the speakers on the day. Thanks to John Breslin and other event organisers.

Emer is the Social Media Manager for Radical, a full service online marketing agency in Dublin. You can find her on Twitter at @emerlawn.

Ted Vickey And Getting The Most Out Of LinkedIn

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Ted Vickey with John Breslin, organiser of BlogTalk 2010.

In the final session of BlogTalk 2010, Ted Vickey gave a talk in which he shared insights, tips and tricks for using LinkedIn.

Ted Vickey (NUI Galway) – Social media and LinkedIn for business from DERI, NUI Galway on Vimeo.

A key takeaway was when Ted suggested that using LinkedIn, or any other social platform for that matter, was like using a muscle. It has to be worked: you either use it or you lose it.

Of course, it has to be worked intelligently, which is where the value in the sharing of his expertise became apparent.

Ted believes LinkedIn to be a powerful business tool for connecting people from down the street to around the world. As part of his PhD studies at NUI Galway, he has begun a research project to better understand the perceived benefits of LinkedIn.

If you would like to help him further in this endeavour please take part in his survey which you can access by clicking on this link: http://ht.ly/2wqK3.

Interview With Darragh Doyle Of boards.ie At BlogTalk 2010

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Click on image to listen

We were granted an audio interview by the delightful Darragh Doyle of boards.ie at last week’s BlogTalk 2010.

You will hear him come up with a somewhat plausible explanation for his dreadful jokes. He also comments on the trials and pitfalls of being an internet celebrity who happens to have a blue nose.

In the final part, he describes his mission which is quite simply to use the Internet to tell people about things.

It is a little under eight minutes and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Highlights from BlogTalk 2010

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Emer Lawn attended BlogTalk 2010 in Galway, Ireland last week, and she has very kindly agreed to share her original post with us here. This account is from day one. Day two will be posted shortly.

Arriving in Galway yesterday with little expectation for what Thursday and Friday would bring at BlogTalk 2010. I was delighted with day one… compelled me to write a blog at least, despite the conference having little or nothing to do with “blogging.” The day started for me with considerations for our identity online and whether we should have one ID for all properties across the Web. Facebook were bravely represented and I’d comfortably stand by them for a while. They are not going anywhere just yet! Credibility is the third thing that stuck out, which, of course, stems from being relevant and interesting.

Highlight of day one for me was the panel on social vs. conversational networks, led by Ade Oshineye of Google. To start the panel off, he walked us through his perspective on the social networking spectrum: social networks like Facebook and Picasa on one side, and conversational networks such as Twitter, Flickr on the other.

In his opinion, “social” is more private and “conversational” is more open. He stated that when a network is more conversational it inspires more creativity. His perspective was interesting, but I was glad to hear from the other panel speakers, Darragh Doyle of boards.ie, Blaine Cook from Webfinger, and Charles Dowd of Facebook, who were able to look at it from different angles.

I managed to capture a good chunk of the panel discussion on video, so thought I would share it here.

Interesting Points From The Discussion?

  • Always remember how a network was engineered. That might provide us with insight behind what the creators of that social network had in mind and which part of the social spectrum a network falls under.
  • Cow Clicker is cool.
  • Consider the identity of someone using Twitter for a business, brand. The people behind the account matter.

Blaine Cook’s example was to think of a social network as like the local coffee shop. You might not go in if that really annoying employee is working that day; but similarly, if that pleasant employee is working, you might feel more inclined. This point is interesting to me, considering my work is looking after Twitter and Facebook for brands. In the same way you get hired to work for a company because you seem like a good fit, any of the the social media profiles and accounts I manage are a good fit for me. Further to that, the future is certainly not having just one Twitter account for a company, but several accounts with individuals named, which is where we need to head to bring a more human touch to the brand. This is particularly important for customer service in social media.

When posed the question, “What impact will mobile have on the future of social media?” the panelists agreed that the Internet PLUS anything else is still the Internet. Perhaps that just means that mobile will contribute to the social world we already live in.

Aside from the panel, there were several other great presentations worth referencing.

John Conroy’s Use Of Twitter For Business Intelligence

The presentation from John Conroy sparked interest in something that I have pondered before about the power of social media and how data on platforms like Twitter can be used to predict external activity.

The examples of using Twitter for business intelligence that John used included measuring buzz around a holiday destination and mapping the number of actual tourists to that destination. The correlation of tweeting activity and destination visits proved his point. Additionally, he used new movie releases as another example: yhe amount of buzz before a movie on Twitter directly correlates with the success of an opening weekend. This means we might be able to predict the outcome of things to come, based on the amount of buzz built up around it online.

Interesting to see the academic approach to Twitter data as this reminded me of the success of two young students, Ben McRedmond (17) and Patrick O’Doherty (16), who created We Predict, demonstrated at the BT Young Scientists Competition. Their tool allowed them to use Twitter to predict the winners of Britain’s Got Talent and the X-Factor (good thing I only caught wind of it after Olly Murs lost, would have ruined it for me).

Dan Gillmor‘s Credibility Scale

Outside of that, I’d say another highlight of day one was Dan Gillmor‘s keynote presentation – “Using Media in a Networked Age” – which was a really great outlook on the democratisation of media and the principles of journalism. This is the side that fascinates me (AKA I’m not technical!).

Dan Gillmor said that committing an act of journalism doesn’t make you a journalist, referencing how bloggers are not journalists and vice versa. Probably the most important thing that I took from his talk was the credibility scale, or what could be called the bullsh*t meter. Some things are so far below zero on the credibility scale that they’d need to improve before even being called “not credible”. Credibility is so important, but we must think about how our credibility is specific to our interest, subject or expertise. Some people at BlogTalk were credible in developing apps, others in marketing brands in social media. So, when finding out where we belong on the credibility scale, it would have to be judged in context.

Bill Liao: Reminder To Be Wise, Interesting And Satisfying

Liao’s presentation was also something I’m glad I didn’t miss. Please, ALWAYS be wise, interesting, and satisfying.

I haven’t even brushed the surface with the above, as my pages of notes would prove; but was delighted to see fresh perspectives being shared in a space where change happens so quickly. Day two proved just as valuable, and I’ll be sure to follow up this post with more from the conference. Head will be buzzing for days I’d say!

Emer is the Social Media Manager for Radical, a full service online marketing agency in Dublin. You can find her on Twitter at @emerlawn.

BlogTalk 2010: Galway, Ireland

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Technology Voice is one of the sponsors of BlogTalk, a conference taking place at the National Univeristy of Ireland, Galway on the 26th and 27th of August. We will have speakers not only from Ireland and Europe, but we also have some who are flying in from America especially to present.

These conferences are important because even though the wonders of the Internet and its associated social media services allow us to be more accessible to each other than ever before, there is stil no substitute for getting a bunch of people into a room and having them meet and talk to each other. Despite all our wonderful technology, there are some things that can only be communicated in person and in not in any other way.

As is becoming more apparent in the conference world and in the ideas underlying the notion of unconferences, the audience is equally important if not actually more important than the speakers. To quote Dan Gillmor, one of our scheduled speakers and whose interview with Technology Voice we will be publishing on Tuesday, August 17th, “The Q&A portion of a talk is always better than the talk. I’ve been to and done several conferences where it was assumed that the main panelists were the people in the audience.”

So, if you do have space in your calendar we would urge you to attend.

At Technology Voice, we will be featuring some of the speakers either through interviews or by way of their response to our popular Social Media Ten Questions item. So look out for those.

Also, we will be covering the actual event with audioboos, tweets, updates and further blog posts here. So if you can’t attend, please don’t feel that you will be completely missing out.

Look forward to seeing you and if we don’t see you, we look forward to hearing from you.