Archive for June, 2009
Social networks for business
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.
Dis.cuss.It results from SurnameDB
Posted by charlie in dis.cuss.it on June 5th, 2009
The Internet Surname Database
We have been running the dis.cuss.it threaded comments widget on the SurnameDB site since the end of January. The site gets a good amount of traffic and therefore makes an ideal partner site for us, so I thought I’d give some details on how it’s going and what we have learned so far.
The SurnameDb had a comments system before it was replaced by dis.cuss.it, this system was built into the application and required a visitor to create an account before they could post. We decided to implement the dis.cuss.it widget using the ‘post moderation’ option so that visitors could just type in their message and enter their name to post.
By removing the registration barrier we imediately saw a ten fold increase in the number of messages posted. On the whole we have found that post moderation works well for the SurnameDB site, most days see just one or two messages being withdrawn as inappropriate. Although occasionally a thread is taken over by school children for a bit of online fun (presumably SurnameDB is used to solve that home work question of what does your surname mean), but these have been easy enough to nip in the bud using the moderation tools.
Recent Posts
A lot of the comments posted on SurnameDB provide good additional information and insight on the origins of the names. By using some server side code we have been able to expose this information to the search engines. SurnameDB relies heavily on the search engines to provide traffic, so this additional content is providing very valuable search engine juice.
Because the widget is set to allow anonymous posts we are seeing only about 2% of commenter’s logging in. This is disappointing, since we would like to see the profile data filling out for the commentators there by creating more trust between visitors and a better sense of community. However we hope that we can improve this by providing better profile views and other login benefits, within the widget.
We will continue to work with SurnameDB to improve the commenting community and the traffic generated by the dis.cuss.it widget. If you would like to see what we could do to help your site please get in touch.
