I’ve just become a shareholder and director in Pyjama Drama, a fantastic company that offers drama, movement and creative play classes to two – seven year olds.  A bit of a departure from what I’ve been doing until now?  Well yes and no.  I’ve always loved drama and although I didn’t take it any further than A-level, I’m completely convinced of the value that children get out of learning drama skills; namely creativity, communication and confidence. I should probably make it absolutely clear, that this isn’t about teaching children how to become a ’star’ a la Britain’s Got Talent, it’s about helping them to develop their creativity and imagination.

Pyjama Drama has been going a couple of years and has 11 franchises across the UK.  There is an absolute ton of potential and it’s really exciting to come onboard and help grow and shape the business.  As we’re still effectively a start-up and everything will be ploughed back into the company, I will be carrying on with my other work for now and dividing my time between the two.  Hopefully some of my pr and social media skills will help us to raise the profile of the business.

I’ll still be keeping this blog running but do have a look at Pyjama Drama, (we’ll be giving the site a complete overhaul very soon) and if you know anyone who has drama skills and is looking for a new venture, then send them our way.

The UK has been a strange place to be over the last week.  No-one could have predicted the bizarre turn of events that saw Cameron and Clegg shake hands on the steps of Number 10 before going in together to make a start on running the country.

And while it didn’t turn out to be the ’social media election’ that was originally predicted, the constant hum from twitter and blogs has, for me and I’m sure many others, provided a fascinating additional layer of commentary, opinion and wit.

In the tech/social media world, there has been just as much going on.  Rather than try and pull it all together into one post, I’ve gone for more of a listing, highlighting some of the more interesting stuff.

• Twitter confirmed it was beta testing its new business centre, which along with @anywhere and the ad platform underlines it’s determination to encourage business to sign up.
• Location based apps & content continue to increase in importance; Foursquare saw it’s 40 millionth check-in while Facebook announced it was teaming up with McDonalds to launch its own geo-location app.
• HP launched Gloe, an experimental app that allows you to map specific web pages onto geographical locations (I really like the look of this, it could open up so many interesting services).

So in the future when people ask you, “where were you when?” you will probably be able to tell them down to the exact spot.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vidiot/69073063/

After coming back from SXSW I was suffering a bit from social media fatigue. Despite deliberately avoiding panels that had social media in any part of the description (always a rehash of the same stuff; the gems at SXSW are in random, bizarre and more pure tech based panels – oh and Clay Shirky), the endless talk about location based services being the next social media landgrab left me feeling a bit, well, bored of it all. Apart from my chat with the lovely James Hart of course

And I’m even more dulled by the never ending “10 ways to demonstrate social media ROI”, “5 ways to build a blog”, “3 ways to skin a cat” blah blah blah.

Then I saw this post by Will McInnes about how taking a break from work, on holiday in the real world, made it even clearer to him how much of a feedback loop the world of social media can be, “Because it has got a bit cluttered and noisy and samey and frankly, a bit overwhelming hasn’t it?” I couldn’t agree more.

But then, just when I was feeling particularly jaded, I had a lovely experience that reminded me of why social media can be hugely enabling. I’ve talked before about the power of social media to build communities but down in London last week I came across a fantastic example. Tweetalondoncab are a collective of London black cab drivers who have got together to offer direct bookings of black cabs via twitter. It’s a great service and one I’d highly recommend. But it’s not the service itself that I wanted to mention, it’s the way in which their use of twitter has helped to build an offline community for the drivers.

My driver was @cabbydavid and he explained how twitter has been fantastic for building a network of like minded friends,”I love it, if it’s 2am and I’m quiet, I just tweet that I’m going to xyz cafe for a cup of tea and I meet up with some of the other cabbies for a chat”. He went on to say that using twitter had expanded his circle of friends and made the whole experience of being a London cab driver, just, well, better. Simple, effective and a reminder that social media doesn’t have to change the world, sometimes it’s enough that it helps us connect with others.

As an aside, we talked briefly about how they could incorporate Foursquare or Gowalla into their services. I’m still pondering this one; tie-ups with cafes, bars? 10% discount offered for cab journeys from various specific check-ins? If anyone has any bright ideas, I know @cabbiescapital would love to hear them.

Oh and I reckon @jackcabnory’s audioboo election updates will be well worth a listen.

*image Patrick Mayon

I’m currently out in Austin for SXSWi, the tech conference that looks at what’s new in the digital world.  As always there are the naysayers who snipe that it’s too big, too mainstream and that the truly cutting edge stuff happens elsewhere but the fact remains it’s a completely unique event that attracts some really interesting people, has a fantastic range of workshops and panels and is, well, fun.  You don’t like it? don’t come, stay at home and moan (tellingly my sister-in-law, who has lived in Austin for 20 years, reckons they’ve been saying that stuff about it since the 2nd sxsw).

This year’s SXSW conference kicked off yesterday and among panels and lunch, I met up with James Hart, the eCommerce director for online fashion retailer ASOS.  James is widely credited with being responsible for ASOS’s phenomenally successful use of social media, an approach that has paid concrete dividends.  ASOS.com attracts over 6.9 million unique visitors a month, has 2.9 million registered users and is rapidly becoming the leading online fashion retailer.  It has multiple twitter accounts which it uses for promotional activity, community outreach and customer relations, a huge Facebook following and its own community on ASOS.com.  Last year they launched ASOS reviews, a site that pulls in quotes from Twitter, classifies them as positive or negative and displays the results; a real-time barometer of customer opinion.  And their most recent initiative is ASOS follows fashion, essentially a site that displays the tweets of other ‘fashion forward’ twitter users.

James was kind enough to answer my questions about how they approach social media, what the benefits have been and what they have planned for the future.

Who is responsible for social media at ASOS?

We don’t consider that social media to ’sits’ within any one department, it’s about treating the customer in the best way possible and that’s everyone’s responsibility within the business.  Essentially we want to make it easier for customers to communicate with us, to buy from us, to ask us questions and social media provides us with a great way of doing that.

Do you measure ROI of your social media activity?

Not specifically no.  We do track our activity but we don’t impose KPIs onto it because we understand that it has intrinsic value.  So if we see that for example, someone mentions us on facebook, perhaps they’ve had a less than great experience, then we pick up on it, deal with it and that has value but we don’t measure it by number of tweets responded to or whatever, because that’s not what it’s about.

What advice would you have for a company that had never used social media before but wanted to get started?

Always start by thinking about the customer and their experience rather than the department within the business, put yourself in the place of the customer, and map out the processes; how they find you, decide whether or not to buy from you, what do they want out of the buying experience itself? then work out which team is best placed to deliver it.

Of course you need to know whereabouts online your customers are, work this out before you do anything.  And be aware that customers want different things and behave differently depending on the social network.  So for us, Facebook people sound off a fair bit and they’re always looking for discount codes, whereas our Twitter customers tend to interact with the brand more. Having said that, although you need to do some research, you can also get so bogged in strategy that it paralyses you from ever actually doing anything.   To an extend you do need to just get on and do it, it’s a bit like the wild west out there, there aren’t any rules and you need to get on and try it out, if it doesn’t work, you can always just change it and try something new.

Talking to James, it sounds like they have some exciting projects in the pipeline and there’s certainly no doubt that they are set to continue their incredible growth.  Our conversation got me thinking about last year’s SXSW where Tony Heish from Zappos took to the stage to talk about how they always start by putting the customer at the heart of everything they do and their social media activity naturally flows from that.   ASOS sound like they take a very similar ‘customer first’ approach and let’s face it, if they can emulate the success Zappos have had they won’t be in bad shape!

I’ve always had an ambivalent relationships with Maths.  It’s not a subject that comes easily to me, I have clear memories of battling my way through it at school, occasionally glimpsing a small chink of light but mostly swimming in a fog of frustration.  Figures became slightly more comprehensible at Economics A-level, somehow applying sums to the real world made it seem clearer, but essentially I’ve always felt maths is a door that remains firmly closed to me and even worse, that if I could somehow prise it open, I’d love what was behind it.

Clearly PR isn’t a profession where its practitioners are renowned for their statistical skills, being able to calculate AVE was about as far as it went.  But increasingly I think data analysis will become a vital skill in PR.  Whether it’s understanding web analytics or mining monitoring data or figuring out how you can game the search algorithm to get your clients to the top (not your area of responsibility? watch out because those SEO guys are closing in on PR territory). Business owners love figures and you need to be able to demonstrate your value in cold hard stats.

Yesterday this article, From Fish to Infinity definitely struck a cord with me and I will be keeping my eye on his regular column.  But for now, I’m about at Humphrey’s level.

image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/akirsa/

In honour of my new site, for anyone who has arrived here without knowing me, I thought I’d do my own. It’s pretty accurate and if nothing else, Wordle always make a lovely picture….

The start of Day 2 was considerably quieter than the first day which undoubtedly had something to do with the official party the night before (I was very boring sensible, opted out and ended up having a lovely dinner with some fantastic people including @vero and @bash).   Jeremiah Owyang's talk was much anticipated but a bit of a let down.  Although he's undoubtedly insightful, articulate and extremely knowledgeable, it did feel a bit like he was preaching to the converted with talk of 'listening' and recruiting brand advocates to help amplify your cause.

The Legend that is Yossi Vardi popped up like a malevolent genie, with a seemingly unending collection of funny photos and videos scraped from YouTube.  As Paul Carr pointed out,"It's like my grandfather has just discovered the Internet."

But whatever you thought of his talk, there's no doubt he was a breath of fresh air in the face of all the earnest talk of how real-time is changing the face of search/the internet/world/universe.  I inadvertently stumbled across him and managed to grab a quick audioboo. And yes it was a slightly bizarre question to ask, don't blame me, I was star-struck, it was all the idea of Mark Rock.

Then the arena become thick with anticipation (and security guards) at the arrival of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah.  She received a rapturous welcome and went out to deliver a surprisingly intrancing speech.  I have to say I was sceptical beforehand but there's no doubt she's intelligent, perceptive and using her incredible power to do some fantastic charity work.

Into the afternoon Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Steve Rubel and others discussed how brands can adapt to real-time WOM.  It was a genuinely interesting discussion, not least because, let's face it, these are the heavyweights of the social meeja world (that's naff but you get my point).  There was a heated debate about the old chesnut how to demonstrate ROI, with some of the panel members suggesting that we shouldn't try, CEOs need to understand that it's not about trying to measure against old metrics etc at which point Brian Solis came out with the quote of the day: "This panel may resonate here but we all have to report to people who don't give a shit".  Quite!

There were more tech gazilionares in the afternoon including Fabrice Grinda (just what was the combined wealth of all the speakers…..) who was refreshingly honest about how great it was to wake up and realise you are worth $40m.  And of course the AWESOME Gary Vee.

It's the first time I went to LeWeb but I truly hope it won't be the last.  Well-organised, fun, inspirational and exciting.  I'll leave the last words to @loic and @geraldine

LeWeb '09 kicked off in style with Loic Le Meur telling the packed conference room that there are over 2000 attendants from over 50 different countries. 
Seeking to capture the zeitgeist of the tech world, Loic called it an historic period in our industry, with real-time changing the face of the web irreversibly.  Combine that with the onward march of mobile, throw in geolocation and connected objects and these are truly exciting times.

So highlights from Day 1

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, tipped up to talk about his new project Square, a nifty piece of hardware that attaches to a range of mobile devices to enable the user to accept credit card payments.  Despite an inevitable few hitches with the live demo (first rule of conferences, even if you've practiced it 300 times back stage, it will never work live), he eventually managed to show it in action and there's no doubt it's innovative.  He admitted they have a fair few issues to iron out and the issue of fraud protection is a mammoth one.

TechCrunch Europe's start-up competition revealed some gems most notably:

Friendbinder, an aggregator of social networks that allows you to see conversation trends and search just within your friends.  

Tigerlilly, a really neat app that makes it much easier to customise the tabs on a Facebook fan page.  It takes away the requirement for FBML plus it's makes it much easier to change the tabs once set up.  Marketers will love it.

Tasky:ly, a streamlined task manager, that made me think "that's exactly what I've been waiting for".

Sokoz a real-time auction system – think ebay but snappier

In the afternoon YouTube founder Chad Hurley seemed fairly underwhelmed about the idea of real-time (perhaps his new passion for racing cars is occupying his mind).  He did throw out some astounding facts and figures about YouTube though, most notably that 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube EVERY MINUTE; that's a lot of cute cat videos.

Scoble introduced pearltrees , which helps you 'organize the web' and definitely deserves a closer look (if for no other reason that it will make it much easier to find previous links that you've shared on Twitter).

And of course, (my hero) Marissa Mayer showed once again why she's the right hand girl of Larry and Sergey and a worthy winner of woman of the year.  Articulate, knowledgeable and with an inside track on one of the most influential companies in the world, she talked about combining social search with real-time and the algorithm Google are working on to better assess which of the real-time web content is most valuable; effectively sorting through the volume to get to the gems.

Roll on Day 2……

Also very timely.  A bit of a rant coming up but I'm getting an increasing number of requests to provide information/advice for free, along the lines of "could you just send me that list of blogger details you mentioned?" or "what's the best way for us to measure xyz and could you just let me see how that works?"

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to provide advice, input, suggestions for existing clients and indeed with peers, potential clients, others in my network.  But there comes a point where knowledge sharing turns into getting stuff for free.

I'm a freelance consultant, that means my knowledge and skills are how I earn a living. The proliferation of content for free on the web, especially around social media and PR, seems to be resulting in people thinking that these kinds of requests are OK.  But really it's like asking your lawyer or accountant to give you some free advice.  And I can imagine the response you'd get to that.

Image by mezzoblue

Econsultancy launched their Social Media and Online PR report yesterday, providing a comprehensive insight into how businesses are currently approaching social media (or not) in the UK. The headline to fall out of the report is that the overwhelming majority of companies (86%) plan to spend more money on social media in 2010, and a further 13% are planning tokeep the same level of budget.

But I think of equal interest is whether we’ve moved on in the last 12 months: are businesses really embracing social media or is there still more talk about it than actual action.

In my recent experience the only larger business that are really embedding social media into their business are either a) those with someone at board level who understands it or b) younger businesses without a pre-existing company culture to stifle it. The report bears this out citing lack of knowledge (50%), lack of senior buy-in (33%), lack of resource (32%) and company culture (28%) as the main barriers preventing clients from engaging in social media activity.

It’s also interesting that smaller organisations (turnover less than £1m) are significantly more likely to be heavily involved in social media.Makes perfect sense, it’s much easier to change direction if you’re a nippy speed boat than a lumbering cruise liner.

I was genuinely surprised that when asked what people viewed as the main benefits of social media, “increased direct traffic to website” was only viewed as a “major benefit” by 56% of respondents. I mean what? Brand awareness, customer engagement, reputation management are all vital but perhapsnot understanding how being able to demonstrate ROI by measuring the effect of activity on brand owned spaces, is why we’re not, as an industry, winning the battle of trying to convince clients why they should bother in the first place.
The first three are lovely and what we know to be valuable but on which we can’t as yet put a price tag, the last one can make it easier to open the door to the sceptic at the top table.

Overall it seems thereis still along way to go before social media engagement (is it just me or isn’t digital engagement starting to sound like a better term?) is anywhere nearbeing an accepted part of business operations. As an industry, education and best practice not quick wins, will be the only way to move this on.

That Tipping Point is a way off yet.

Image by Nicora