I’m changing tack! To follow my continued interest in creating better communities, better teams and better ways of working together, I’m leaving the social media ocean, which has met many of the needs of individuals but has struggled to build collaboration and dependable communities.

So  as I head into new waters, I’d like to invite you to join me.  The new waters are:

The Sea of Meetings

We all have meetings and I guess we all feel they could be a bit more efficient.  I’m going to be focusing specifically on the structure of meetings: agendas, minutes and actions – helping people to get the meeting, this fundamental unit of team work, right. How can we use web technology to make meetings altogether better and more productive?

The blog for this is http://www.themeetingminutes.com – a web resource for anyone searching for advice on running great meetings. It features my own posts and also guest posts – so if you have a view of meetings that you’d like to share – ping me a mail (toby@pailz.com) – and I’ll send you a brief.

TheMeetingMinutes.com - meeting advice blog

The Big Game River

Games are everywhere, we play them everyday, we just don’t usually call them out as such. Whether it is ‘levelling up’ at work with a promotion or losing points on your driving licence, the mechanics of gameplay are often used.  Over the next few years, as a new generation of workers join the workplace, those brought up with the benefits of game playing, will expect those same benefits when applied to work. Common game benefits such as transparency of how to win (which points make prizes) and visibility of progress and where you stand versus colleagues (leaderboard) will become standard.

I’m launching a blog to track and analyse this change – called ‘Gamification Of Work‘ – do subscribe and keep track on the Game Layer at the top of the world….

And social?

I’m afraid that means the end of blogging at The Social Bazaar – the social layer is built, it is now widely understood, now on to build the game layer…  join me

William Hague responds to my request for information on our Libyan strategy...

Yes, it’s end-of-the-week bug-bear time. Today I’m going to express a slight irritation over the handling of unread flags for social media inboxes by my various smart devices.

Let’s take the example of a simple twitter @ response. In this case one I received from William Hague (good in itself) to a simple question I posed to him about Libya on twitter (‘Why are we there?’) during a demonstration of the power of social media. I saw his response appear on my Blackberry and I retweeted it proudly. That all went well.

However, what is less satisfactory, is that I was also notified about this tweet mention on my android phone (ok so maybe I’m on odd in having two phones) despite already having ‘read’ it on my blackberry. I also was notified when I opened my Ipad by the twitter app that sits on there.

I don’t want to have to read things twice or even three times to flag that I read it. It’s a complete waste of time.

The problem is that the unread / read flag (as so often used by email inboxes) is not shared by the API or is not handled correctly by the various client software.

This isn’t a problem limited to Twitter – I get frustrated having to ‘mark as read’ LinkedIn emails online that I’ve responded to via my phone, via email or on the Ipad, it’s also a problem with Facebook messages and notifications – the Facebook for blackberry app currently shows 23 unread messages yet when I look online I’m all up to date.

It’s a problem that unless addressed is only set to get worse as we get more platforms and more devices – I like the convenience of accessing social messages from various devices but this is an issue I just wish would go away.

So, if you’re implementing a social media platform then please make sure the unread/read flag is part of your messaging API. If you’re implementing a social media client application then make sure you take account of the unread/read flag (thank you Flipboard who are quite good at this!) and you’ll make the information stream a better, less frustrating place to be.

End of bug-bear. Have a great Royal Wedding weekend!

Is this copyright fraud or not?

[Toby is on holiday this week]

From left: Toby, Kevin, Steve and Iskandar

Well we did the deal and joined forces with Syncapse.  This is all good news for clients as it adds Syncapse’s significant technology capacity to the already valuable strategic creative offering from Nudge.

Here’s the picture of the deal signing with the Nudge directors and Kevin Astle from Syncapse  above. Find out more with the techcrunch article and the inside facebook one.

Onward and upward!

Geoff giving his workshop to another packed crowd at the Social Media World Forum in London

Phew what a conference! 3 workshops and a keynote later – everything is now up on the web. Here are the links:

Keynote - how the social media machine has already taken over, how the Facebook stream works to bring you your most interesting personalised daily newspaper and how we need to stop seeing social media as a fad and to change our language accordingly.  (text / slides)

Workshop 1 – How to Market your brand / run a social media campaign on Facebook – tips and checklist from the experts(!) (slides)

Workshop 2 - Learnings from successful campaigns – mainly my learnings from campaigns I’ve run that worked. (slides)

Workshop 3 – Geoff Hughes’ whistle stop tour of ROI and ways to measure it on Facebook (prezzy)

Workshop 4 – The Viral Loop – signposting key techniques on leveraging a viral loop (slides)

Enjoy! Please do let me know what you think of the keynote….

Spotify machine at nudge london

So we’re using the awesome Spotify music service here in the Nudge office and have come up with a few rules of use which I share here.

1. Only one person active at one time

You can either grab the keyboard of the spotify machine or move the mouse using WinVNC (a remote desktop tool) but only one person at a time.

2. Don’t queue thousands of tracks

Just stick to a couple of albums at a time, while Carpenters might be a nice album break from constant Linkin Park, no-one wants to hear every song they ever wrote – just because you could doesn’t mean you should.

3. Don’t delete the queue

Ok so you’ve got a song you must play – feel free to jump the queue but don’t delete the queue – hey it took me at least 30 seconds to get that play queue set up.

4. Don’t add to a playlist unless you’re sure

We have a few fave shared playlists – like the current Top 40, the Nudge HQ hot list and my own Wake Me Up which I use fairly  often in place or with caffeine. Our rule is keep emlean and clean.

5. Use Spotify Friends to expand your music taste

This neat little website holds some great playlists – why be a DJ when you can enjoy someone else’s taste…

Well the new Facebook home page is a definite improvement – a few things I like – filtering the feed by type of friends (see how to set up your friend lists), the right hand side has more stuff on there – feels a bit more like the featured on the Bebo home page.

However I don’t like “What’s on your mind?” – a slightly creepy question – if I say “Cheeseburger” does that mean ads for Macdonalds vouchers are going to start popping up? Still it’s probably better than “What are you doing?” (thanks Dave Nattriss for remembering for me…)

Facebook's new home page

You can filter by app which is interesting though you can’t quite control which apps you filter by – it gives me the chance to filter by movies but not by my friend’s super photos.

Also “updates” have gone from the home page. Great, now I don’t hear any marketing update messages at all from those 50 pages I’m a fan of… good for users – less good for marketers.

Overall, this is about monetising Facebook. With the addition of highlights there is now more home page real estate dedicated to ads. It will be interesting to see how it develops and what the options are for advertisers.

Filtering my home page through the movies application lens

Slideshare

Slideshare is now attracting more of my attention (not least because they put my slides from the social networking world forum last week on their home page). I’ve come across some really great slide shows that save me having to go to all these pesky conferences. For an example of a rule breaking 162 slide presentation (believe me – it’s so good you’ll watch it to then end) check out the brand gap.

Hey I made it to the slideshare home page

Sky News

Check out my most recent appearance on Sky News on my site: http://www.tobyberesford.com - you can catch me again this Wednesday 18th at 7pm UK time. Any comments on how I can improve my style of presentation gladly received!

This week twitter took over the Skittles home page and anytime you wrote a tweet it went straight to the home page – suddenly messages like “Skittles shown to cause cancer” appeared on the home page – it takes a gutsy brand but once the fuss has died down it points to the end of the web and the rise and rise of the social web. The customer is once again king.

Skittles changed their web site to go 100% social

Twitter Clients

I have been experimenting with various twitter clients such as Twhirl, Twitter mobile and Twitter on Facebook – but it looks like the emerging winner is TweetDeck which sits very nicely on my second monitor. I love the quick URL crunching tool – which makes tweeting that bit easier.

Tweetdeck is the most usable twitter client

Profile waste of time

In the old days we used spend our downtime changing the screen colours on our Windows settings – this has been replaced by the ultimate vanity of changing the profile photos.  Read this enjoyable post from All Facebook to see all the different types of Photo styles people have come up with.

Number one of the profile photo styles

There’s a useful new button on your Facebook Events page called “Export Events” – it lets you save your Facebook events in a format so you can import them into Outlook or your Google Calendar. I tried following the instructions on Inside Facebook and it works really well, would be great if it was automated via Goosync but it’s a good start.

An event as it appears on Facebook

The same event now on Google Calendar

Funny for Money

The Comic Relief App is live- try it here and raise some money for COmic Relief. Try your joke telling skills out and impress your  friends.

Be Funny for Money for Comic Relief

The Facebook Garage hackathon for Comic Relief on Saturday took up much of my social week. We organised it as a “master chef” style head to head between three teams, all competing to create the best Facebook application in a day.

I did the Simon Cowell job of judging which is a lot harder than it looks. Our judging criteria were - 

• monetisation - did it meet Comic Relief’s business objectives to raise donations for Red Nose Day?
• distribution - how likely to spread and be viral was it?
• usability - did it look nice and was it simple enough to use?
• innovation - was it a new idea?
• funny - Comic Relief is all about doing something funny for money – was the app funny?

There were three entrants:

• Chris Thorpe (with a little help from Amber) created a comic relief quiz which was clever technically as a Facebook Connect app that also ran on Myspace
• Fabio de Bernardi and Carlos’s “I like u coz” which got friends to donate towards heart warming stories about each other
• Mat Clayton, Sam Stokes, Dan Lester and Josh March’s put together a great looking Funny for Money app to rate each other jokes. Each time you give a friend a red nose as an award you give a donation to Comic Relief.

Hacking away

The Funny for Money app from Mat and team was judged the winner as it’s working Paypal integration, great look and feel and simple working concept made this the Comic Relief Hackathon winner for 2009. 

It goes live on Wednesday – the event is supported by 5 million ad impressions from Adknowledge, sweatshirts from Facebook, the venue from Microsoft Biz Spark and hosting by EveryCity. Check out the Every City sponsored hackathon web site for more.

Created in just one day by a team of four

Friend Lists

Hardly seems time to include anything else in this week, however I must just tell you about Friend Lists on Facebook – they are the cure to the problem of ensuring your boss doesn’t see what you did last weekend.

Arrange your friends into friend lists for better privacy control

Here’s how they work:

• You segment your Facebook friends into different groups – I have quite a few but you only really need two or three, for instance I separate between “Clients, Old friends, Current friends, Church people, Work Colleagues and Family”.  
   
• You can use whatever categories you like as these lists aren’t shared with anyone  but you.
• Then you set for each friend list what they can and can’t see. Clients only see Posted Notes and Items and my professional profile while Family and Friends can see all my photos, status and even photos my friends tag me in (though this can sometimes be embarassing)
   
• You can even check it by using the profile privacy settings and use “See how a friend sees my profile” You can then check for individual friends that they are only seeing the aspects of you that you want them to see. 

How my work colleagues see me

It’s a great way to manage your privacy while keeping all your social network contacts in one place.

Have a social week!