2 important dates for your diary:

1) Meetdraw 5 “So Meety” is being held at Bar So on Thursday 18th March from 6:30pm. Everyone is welcome whether you work for an agency, in-house team, freelance or currently studying. A great event to meet and network with fellow tech/web people locally.

and…

2) BarCamp Bournemouth 2 – April 10/11th at Bournemouth University, a 2 day self-organising un-conference – for anyone interested in tech/web stuff.

My quick effort at an FAQ:

What is a BarCamp? Its a 2 day event, starting at 930am and going right through till 4pm on the sunday – turn up, give a talk if you want to (or not if you don’t) and learn from/discuss with / laugh at people in the tech community. (see wikipedia or barcamp.org)

Is that something to do with drinking? – No… not really… but yes, the bar will be open and used as one of the discussion spaces.

What went on at BarCamp Bournemouth 1? Lots of stuff… my highlights are here.

More info and stuff coming on the website soon – if you’d be interested in part sponsoring Bar Camp, please drop me a line – you’ll get space on the website,a logo on the Uni TV (from now till event) etc etc

Tags: #bcbomo2, meetdraw

The trend for pointless Facebook pages continues, with lots of “million people who love custard” or statements as pages “Sitting in the bath” – they grow very well virally and rapidly, but what’s the point?

Well…. I’ve noticed a new trend on Facebook recently – a lot of groups, aiming to build a million+ users, follow a formula generally as follows:

1. Create a largely pointless page as above, the more controversial/amusing/”so true” the better.
2. Seed the group to your circle and watch it grow virally (hopefully).
3. Once large enough, add favourite pages for the actual business/person that they were hoping to promote and update to all the fans – sometimes related, usually not.

If 1% of 1,000,000 fans checked out the real target, you’ve just created a huge amount of traffic to try and convert.

It’s clever, but not necessarily very ethical – I guess it’s the Facebook “bait n switch”. Maybe I should of called it “grey hat” (a term stolen from SEO) as it’s not really specifically against the Facebook TOS?

Tags: facebook, marketing, social engineering

There’s a few questions that always pop up when I speak, I’m going to tackle one of them today following a discussion I took place in over the weekend:

What’s the right mix for status updates (or tweets)?

I’d summarise it as the following:

• Frequency
• Relevance
• Personality
• Purpose
• Consistency

All of these are underpinned by the central question you should ask yourself – what do the people following me, who subscribe to these updates expect?

I sometimes see status updates, used for two different things, when really they should use two streams or types of resource.

A good example of this was the event that prompted the discussion, a bar in Bournemouth began posting every record played, as it happened.

• Some people loved it.
• Some people hated it so much they sent abusive messages to the bar.
• Most people were either indifferent, or switched off without saying anything.

Then the bar apologised… and the usual war of words/trolls began, but it was this bit that stood out for me:

A: “If you don’t like the updates unfollow”

B: “I want updates, just not a flood of them!”

A valued follower, taking the time to say “less updates” – I wish I could look back, or measure how many people either unfollowed or hid updates from this bar – it’d be very interesting numbers.

Anyway, the moral for me is – horses for courses – there is a place for the track-listing high frequency type updates, but maybe it wasn’t the same as the general stream – is that true for your business?

Listen to what your customers/users/followers tell you, with an eye on the quiet many – in the case above, the silent majority and the smallest minority that commented negatively were the voices that needed to be heard and not those of the vocal supporters (who interestingly mostly came round to the 2 stream idea, after I proposed it).

Have consistency with how/when/why you tweet/blog/update – occasional changes (like if you’re at a conference) can be accepted, of course.

Tags: community, microblogging, status, twitter

I’ve been considering writing an outline of some of the more popular social networking sites and tools for a while now and this weekend I’ve created a first draft which I intend to add to as time goes on.

With any business strategy, start first with the “Why?” and set some SMART goals to work towards, then work out which resource helps you to achieve it… hopefully start here, will help with the second part of that.

In part this page was also a follow up to last weeks presentation at the Poole Business Women’s Lunch Club where I felt I hadn’t covered all of the ground as thouroughly as I would of liked in the time given.

All thoughts, comment and feedback welcome.

Tags: strategy

UPDATE: DO NOT remove this item, see GeekDrop Facebook Spybot entry for more info.

hat tip to @tomharvey888 who sent me this:

RT @bengie Has your facebook been running slow? Go to “Settings” > “application settings” > “added to profile”. delete “unnamed application” -> spybot

Do i have the so called Facebook Application spybot? Apparently so.

Clicking settings will cause an unknown error and the application profile does not exist (it will redirect you to home).

I’m not convinced this is malicious and with no evidence to suggest it is a spybot (would love to hear from you, if you do with a source), I remind you of the SULFNBK.EXE (Symantec) fake alert inviting you to delete a file that was actual an integral part of windows.

I think the most likely explanation for this unnamed app is a leftover from a now removed function – perhaps one from before the profile view was changed.

To remove or not to remove the Facebook spybot? …that is the question.

I’d like to hear from anyone who does not find this when they follow the instructions above, so far everyone I know who has tried this did… which would suggest to me it’s more likely a remnant as above.

Thoughts, screenshots… all welcome below.

Tags: facebook, spybot, virus