Archive for social media
Social media, protests and lessons from the Arab Spring
How does social media help anti-government protesters? How does it help the governments resisting them? I was part of a discussion on this topic on the BBC’s Daily Politics earlier this week: For more on this question, see my magazine article from last year The Arab Spring, social media and lessons for future revolutionaries: “The [...]
Councillor Camp: 10 questions to see if your council gets digital
My session this morning at Councillor Camp (well done to the team organising it – excellent job!) was about how councillors can prod their councils into getting digital. It was in the form of 10 questions to ask and as I’ve now had several requests for the slides, here they are for your delectation, followed [...]
Wrexham Council shows how not to do digital
As today’s excellent Councillor Camp demonstrated, there is lots of great digital work being done by local councillors and local councils. But as this story tweeted around today also illustrates, there is still a long way to go in some places: A Welsh council banned reporters from live tweeting at a meeting this morning. The [...]
By 2015 more people will use social networks than vote
The latest PR Week Soap Box features this from myself on how social media is changing public affairs: At the time of the 2010 general election, more adults had broadband than voted. By the 2015 election, on current trends*, there will be more adults using social networks than vote. There will, no doubt, still be [...]
5 things you shouldn’t miss: cookies, share prices, smart phones and more
Welcome to the latest of my monthly collections for the Engine Group of five links that you shouldn’t miss. Last mintue change to cookie law advice http://bit.ly/KJ0lQe Just before the deadline for implementing new cookie rules for websites the Information Commissioner’s Office has changed its advice, introducing a more relaxed view of ‘implied consent’: “implied [...]
Mark Schaefer’s Return on Influence: charting a revolution or indulging in hype?
Early on in Mark Schaefer’s book Return on Influence there is a graph showing the level of traffic to Quora as it progressed from launch in early 2010 to hot trendy site in early 2011. There is a massive spike in traffic during that transition, triggered by Robert Scoble’s eulogising post “Is Quora the Biggest [...]
Think you know Pinterest? Think again
The swift rising of new social network Pinterest is understandably resulting in people falling ravenously on any data for who is using it, how and why. The risk is that a single source of data ends up being widely circulated and taken as gospel, when an alternative analysis tells a very different story. (The failure [...]
The evolution of the internet: good news for people with faulty keyboards
Trace the evolution of online copy from websites through blogs to social networks to micro-blogging status updates and you see two changes. Updates get quicker, and shorter. You can’t get much shorter than zero words and that’s the region which services such as Instagram and Pinterest now hover in. The user generated content is all about photos or highlighting [...]
Usain Bolt will be the Jonathan Ross of 2012
Usain Bolt: short, cropped hair, champion sprinter, middle name St. Leo, winner of three Olympic gold medals. Jonathan Ross: long, wavy hair, TV present, middle name Stephen, winner of three BAFTAs. An incongruous pair, you may think. But one thing will bring them together in 2012: social media. Jonathan Ross, back in January 2009, played [...]
