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Social networks for business

Knowledge Sandwich

Knowledge Sandwich

I gave a talk on Wednesday at the Huddersfield Media Centre’s inaugural Knowledge Sandwich event, about using social networks to promote your business, it’s been a long time since I last gave a talk like this, so it was pretty exciting. The talk was just 20 mins and had to be accessible to all, so it was a pretty basic overview of how things work, and how I think they can be used to raise the profile and interest in a business. The talk was a good driver for discussion, and we covered some interesting areas.

For me the key points revolved around the fact that social media works best when it’s about individuals and not organisations. It’s about building reputation and trust. Prospective customers will be more likely to deal with a company if they know and like some of the individuals within it. So get employees to tweet as themselves not as the company.

Whilst giving the talk I came up with what I think is a pretty neat twitter theory (I’m sure it’s probably been discussed before). Twitter is a celebrity driven environment, the biggest names on twitter are some of the biggest celebrities in real life. But a lot of the lesser known people we follow are personal celebrities to us. I follow a number of people who are experts in my field and are celebrities in my eyes, but 99% of the world population wouldn’t have a clue who they were.

This talk also gave me the chance to use Docubate as a presentation tool, and I think it worked pretty well. The trick is to change the view mode to “slide mode” and then go full screen. I was then able to cue up all the webpage examples I wanted to show live in different tabs of the browser, and then just control tab between them as and when needed.

Anyway I think the Media Centres Knowledge Sandwich format worked well, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

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FOWA London 2009

FOWA

FOWA

Nigel and I are big fans of the Carsonified crew and their Future Of Web Apps event. It was after attending FOWA three years ago that I realised the way we where trying to build our web apps was too long winded and complicated. I haven’t missed a show since, and heartily recommend them to anyone either working on a web app or just starting out with an idea.

It’s also a great event for mingling with other developers, investors and marketeers. I’m expecting lots of interesting insight into live activity streams this year which will be great for the work we are planing on dis.cuss.it

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