5 of this year’s great Social Media Books via Mashable, books definitely worth investing in.
Tag: Videos
Reflections on TedxTuttle
Earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to attend the TedxTuttle event in London. The event featured a host of great speakers, mixed in with some Ted Talks and an opportunity to meet some great people.
The keynote speech was presented by Maggie Philbin, who presented a series of great clips from the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World program. This was a real treat, as I was avid fan of the programme and even today, the theme music still brings back many happy memories of the programme. The clips centred around three decades (60s, 70s and 80s) and showed a number of technologies that became popular and others that did not. Incidentally, the BBC are now presenting an archive of Tomorrow’s World clips which can be accessed here: www.bbc.co.uk/archive/tomorrowsworld.
Maggie also presented “Philbin’s Fact File”, which touched on a number of points, the she believed would make a business successful. Nothing new here, but all good stuff nevertheless.
Communicate as if person to person
Be outstanding
Innovate, don’t imitate
Go beyond "just enough"
Create an experience
Exceed expectations
In all, it was an excellent keynote and it is great to see that she is still so passionate about science and technology.
The next talk was presented by Rachel Armstrong and discussed the future of architecture. Rachel, is a TED fellow and presented a fascinating talk, which at times was a little above my head, but interesting nevertheless. Rachel’s interest in architecture surrounds the materials that we choose to build structures. Her ongoing research examines how low tech biotech technologies could be used to build sustainable structures for the future.
Next up was Tuttle founder Lloyd Davis, who described the Tuttle experience to the audience. The Tuttle Club meets every Friday at 10am at the ICA in London and has been running for eighteen months. This is remarkable, since many social media networking meet-ups, disappear after only a few months. Lloyd, mentioned that there was no real secret to Tuttle’s success. However, he believed that ‘diversity and inclusion’ were important factors. Anyone is welcome to attend Tuttle and judging by the slideshow of photos that were presented, the event is growing with ever increasing numbers of people. Tuttle exists and is supported by social technologies such as Twitter. However, many argue that online social networking lacks opportunities to actually meet people in the flesh. Tuttle is the antidote to such thinking.
I grabbed a quick chat with Lloyd during one of the coffee breaks. I last met him during the Blue Monster Coffee morning, at a time just before Tuttle started. It was a great to catch up and I’m going to do my best to get along to the next Tuttle meet up.
Next up was Ben Walker, who delivered a great talk (mainly in song) about the value of Twitter. Babble+Context=Conversation! Conversation=Value! Ben is known for the viral Twitter Song, which you can see below.
The last of main speakers was Mat Morrison of Porter Novelli who delivered a very interesting talk on social media metrics. Mat debunked the traditional held view on viral marketing that person tells everyone in a cumulative fashion to spread and idea, instead he proposed that great ideas don’t spread evenly. In other words, not everyone in a network is equal. If, you take Gladwell’s theory from the Tipping Point, you get the idea here. He also, focused on Clay Shirky’s recent points that we are currently experiencing “social media overload” – We need adequate social media filters to reach out to people, to enable a great OTS (Opportunity To See).
He also shared with the audience some interesting words in relation to social media:
“Eigenfactor” – A Page Rank for people
“Betweeenness – Someone who is very well connected
“Egonet” – A relation where size = popularity
“Homophily” - A term relating to people who hang around other people who are most like them. (Birds of a feather that flock together)
Mat is conducting some very interesting research into the area of influencers and has some great examples here.
Mat summed with the following excellent point,
“We tend to associate ourselves with people who are like us, allowing us to judge people on the people they follow”.
Photo credit – @maggiephilbin’s twitpic
He ended his presentation with remarkable honesty, “insufficient evidence for a real conclusion”. His research into this areas continues.
Between, each of the speaker talks, there were a number of excellent Ted Talks that were shown. You can view each of them below. Overall, TedxTuttle was excellent. Great speakers, inspiring talks and a great venue. Congratulations to Alan Patrick and his Broadsight team for delivering such an excellent event.
Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation
Clay Shirky: How social media can make history
PW Singer on military robots and the future of war
Is Social Media a Fad?
Is Social Media a Fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This is the question posed by the folks over at the Socialnomics blog.
The above video goes some way to answer the question. The video is designed in a similar fashion to the “Did you know” video.
Socialnomics have also been good enough to provide the stats from the video too. These can be seen below:
Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)
- By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
- Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
- 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
- Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
- Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
- comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
- 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
- 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
- % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
- Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
- 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
- Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
- What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
- Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
- There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
- 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
- If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
- Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
- People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
- Only 14% trust advertisements
- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
- 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
- Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
- 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
- According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
- 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
- In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
- More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
- Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
- Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser
A link to the sources are available here. Incidentally, Socialnomics will soon be releasing a book too.
Welcome to the Social Media Revolution
Seth Godin and Tom Peters On Social Media
Three great videos from Seth Godin and Tom Peters.
Seth Godin
“… It doesn’t matter if no one reads your blog. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it”.
“…How do you force yourself to describe in three paragraphs, why you did something? How do you respond out loud?”. If you are good at it, some people are going to read it. If you are not good at it, stick with it, you will get good at it”.
“…You are doing it for yourself, to force yourself to become part of the conversation”.
Tom Peters
"I will simply say, my first post was in August of 2004. No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life, it has changed my perspective, it has changed my intellectual outlook. It has changed my emotional outlook, parenthesis and it is the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude, that I have ever had and it’s free”.
Seth Godin
"Networking is always important when it is real, and its always a useless distraction
when its fake. What the Internet has allowed, it an enormous amount of fake networking".
25 Reasons Why We Left Facebook?
Could this be the reason why we are all leaving Facebook?
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Biz Stone Interviewed!
As Steve mentions on his blog, Microsoft’s Mel Carson was lucky enough to interview Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in Cannes last week. Mel does a great job on the interview. Watch the video above to learn:
- What is Biz’s favourite Twitter app?
- How many registered apps use the Twitter API?
- Why is Biz Stone in Cannes with lots of advertising people?
Google Steps Up With a New Wave
Google are set soon to release “Wave” and I predict it will be a major game changer. Imagine email, instant messaging, wikis, forums, blogs, mobile, SMS all being replaced with Google Wave. Check out at least the first 40 minutes of video for an introduction to the developer preview. I can’t wait to try it out.
Technorati Tags: Google Wave
Building a Business Which is Net Positive
I recently finished reading, “Innocent – Our Story and Some Things We’ve Learned”. A great insight into the culture of Innocent Drinks. The book provides an excellent overview of the history of the company and the ethical and environmental stance the business takes in sourcing its ingredients. The book also offers lots of practical business advice for entrepreneurs. If you are a fan of the drinks, this is a must read book!
The video above summarises the Innocent story in under ten minutes and features co-founder Richard Reed. He discusses five areas in which he believes has made Innocent Drinks a success. These areas include:
1. The nature of things made – 100% natural, 0% concentrate.
2. Procuring ingredients in an ethically and environmentally conscience way.
3. Producing packaging with a lighter foot print (recyclable/biodegradable).
4. Conserving energy – (refusing to air freight fruit and sourcing locally produced produce).
5. Sharing profits – 10% of profits are donated to good causes.
Overall, by following the guiding principles above, Innocent is building a business which is “net positive”.
UPDATE
Take a look at the video below for a tour of Innocent Drinks at Fruit Towers in West London.
Fantastic.
Ted Talk: Seth Godin On Tribes We Lead
Last year I reviewed Seth Godin’s latest book called Tribes. I enjoyed this book and Seth’s talk at TED is a great synopsis of the book. In a “Twitter world” where we follow others, Tribes empower individuals. The book serves as a good reminder that by starting a movement, it is possible to change the world.
Print Websites Easily with Print Friendly
Print Friendly is a nice site which helps to correctly format web pages for printing. The site also optimises your printing, by removing annoying ads to. If you print content from the web, Print Friendly is definitely worth checking out.
Technorati Tags: Print Friendly