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presentation slides: having difficult conversations

Most companies still have a mass mentality. The individual knowledge, skill and creativity held by staff is hidden behind processes devised in the image of the assembly line.

Products and services are viewed as a source of profit at the point of sale, not after - so talking to customers who have already spent their money is seen as a cost not a source of value.

This presentation, my Keynote at Unicom explores the ways social media can change all this and provides a 4 step approach to the process of socialising the way your organisation listens, acknowledges, engages and collaborates with consumers, audiences and stakeholders.

Having Difficult Conversations

View more PDF documents from Robin Hamman.

presentation on flickr in the cultural and heritage sectors

Steve Bridger has been kind enough to share his presentation about Flickr in the Cultural and Heritage Sectors. It's a really well thought out, beautifully presented set of slides providing many insights, and examples, to those trying to make the most out of photographic assets through sharing...

eurovision contest predictor based on search data

Last year, I ended up watching the Eurovision Song Contest because I wanted to take part in the conversations my friends were having about it on Twitter. In the resultant blog post, I looked forward to this year:

"Broadcasters and content providers should take note. What I participated in last night would be almost totally invisible to most viewers. Most people don't know how to find and track conversations on twitter, other social networking services or blogs. But being part of an audience community is a powerful experience for participants and a valuable brand building tool for broadcasters and other content producers.

We need to make it as easy as possible for ordinary users to find and participate in conversations around our content. The way to do that isn't to duplicate the tools and services that are already out there, but to create interfaces, windows, that let people see and join into the conversation. Underlying that interface there might be all sorts of complex tools - hashtags, tweetscan, summize and twitterlocal are all useful - but in pulling them all together in a meaningful way, much of the complexity and need for prior knowledge is removed. Achieve that and next year's Europarty is going to be unforgettable."

Well, it's time for Eurovision again, but I've yet to see any good mash-ups or aggregations of conversations people are having around the contest or coverage of it but I have found an interesting piece of data mining by google, who has created a predictor gadget that looks at searches, filters in various ways for better accuracy, then ranks the contestants:

You might also want to follow tweets mentioning eurovision. Let me know if you find that mashup or aggregation I as hoping for.

journalism enterprise & entrepreneurship unconference (jeecamp)

Last Friday I attended Jeecamp - the Journalism Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Unconference -  in Birmingham. The event, organised by Paul Bradshaw from Birmingham City's School of Media, brought together journalists, editors, academics and entrepreneurs for a day of interesting discussion.

 It's already, given the subject matter, been blogged to death so I won't duplicate the effort of others here, but I did want to point you to Journalism.co.uk's audio of the panel I was on along with Jo Wadsworth (Brighton Argus), Andy Dickinson (UCLAN), and Robin Morley (BBC) which was moderated by Dave Hart (Digital Birmingham).

For more coverage of the event, see Michael Haddon's posts for the Telegraph or Martin Belam's PDA Newsbucket piece on the Guardian website.

we interrupt this programme for an enterprise social media presentation

It's not often that I write a post about the other side of social media - the tools, such as wikis and knowledge sharing networks - that sit behind corporate firewalls. This is, in part, because I tend to use consumer facing tools to do the same things, but also because I often prefer to expose a lot about what I'm doing to a wider audience because it gives me the opportunity to get feedback from a wider range of people with thoughts and experiences which might prove helpful. Enterprise tools and consumer facing social media can, of course, be complimentary.

I've no doubt that enterprise social tools do have their place, and having used a number of different systems for tracking time spent on projects, to triage post-launch site bugs, and keep track of commercial contacts and opportunities, I'm starting to actually like them. Well, if not like then at least understand their value.

I recently came across a presentation on slideshare that does a good job of explaining what enterprise social tools are all about. What I particularly like about it is the way that it draws analogies between one person's, Charlotte's, use of social tools in both her personal and professional lives.

Meet Charlotte

View more presentations from Daniel Siddle.

social media training course

One of the best things about my job is that I have various opportunities to inform and enthuse people about the benefits of using social media tools and services to support their existing processes. In order for social media to be genuinely useful, it has to become part of a person or organisation's everyday practice. If it's not, then it just becomes an additional burden - something extra they have to do rather than something that helps them to achieve their goals personal or professional objectives.

Readers who follow my twitter feed or dopplr updates will know that I've recently been traveling around the country a lot. Most of this has been to provide the 10 finalists of NESTA's Big Green Challenge with social media training to help them use photo-sharing, video-sharing, mobile phones, social networking and blogging to inform a wider audience about their work, reach out to new supporters and likeminded groups, and to better organise their own efforts. It's been great fun - I've met some wonderful people along the way, learned about some wonderful projects, and seen parts of the country I'd never otherwise have the opportunity to see. Here's a map showing where I've been or will be going over the remaining few weeks of the training:

View Larger Map

I've also been authoring blog posts - a sort of beginners guide to using social media - on the Big Green Challenge Blog. Here's an index to the posts I've published thus far:

1. Introduction: social media and the whole web as your canvas
2. Reaching new audiences with photo-sharing
3. Sharing your videos online
4. Getting started making google maps
5. Taking the internet everywhere
6. Live and direct with your mobile

There are at least two more posts to come - blogging, which should appear next week, and finding and keeping track of content, which will cover social bookmarking, RSS and searching for blogs.

my mobile journalism presentation

Slideshare doesn't seem to like the Below you'll find the presentation on mobile journalism I'll be delivering to students on the MA Magazine and Newspaper Journalism course at City University, London on Thursday. The presentation looks at:

    •    service providers - why do companies offer services which enable mobile content uploading and social networking?
    •    citizen journalism - what motivates people to "report" what they witness; what sort of content do they create and share?
    •    journalism - how are professional journalists and new organisations using mobiles?
    •    tools - what tools are available for documenting and sharing content online?

And at some point during the lecture I'm hoping to involve some professional mobile journalists - by mobile, of course....

mobile + journalism: get your mojo

View more presentations from Robin Hamman.

Download Zipped Presentation - Keynote

good presentation slides on "micro-sociology of networks"

David Armano, VP of Experience Design at Critical Mass has posted the slides from a presentation on the "Micro-sociology of Networks" he'll be giving at The Parsons School for Design:

The Micro-Sociology of Networks

View more presentations from David Armano. (tags: behavior human)

conferences this week: dna2009 and social media influence

It appears that conference season has begun.

On Tuesday I moderated a panel about using social media to have "difficult conversations at Social Media Influence in London with panelists Headshift's Lee Bryant (my boss), Andy Hobsbawm from Agency.com and Paolo Valdemarin of Evector.

[Photo by Kris Hoet]

Today, I'm on two panels during the final afternoon of DNA2009 in Brussels. I'll be joining Laura Oliver (journalism.co.uk), Darren Waters (BBC), Katharina Borchert (WAZ) and Bart Brouwers (Spits) for a panel about twitter, moderated by Ben Hammersley and possibly being joined remotely by Jeff Jarvis.

Later I'm on an experts panel responding to questions about social media.

Follow it all on twitter...

update...15.17:

John Thompson, publisher of the excellent Journalism.co.uk, streamed the panel live. Here's the first of his four clips:

Watch live video from johncthompson's channel on Justin.tv

twitter: more than just a fount of free drinks

Over the years I reckon I've tried hundreds of social networking sites, blogging and micro-blogging tools, online participatory spaces, and content sharing services. In most instances I register, set up a profile, have a look around, and abandon all in the space of about a week.

So how do I gauge whether I'm going to stick with a service or tool for longer? Well, more than a few times I've jokingly said that I know a social media service is useful as soon as I get a free coffee or beer out of it. And, actually, that's about right. If I start using a site or service and can quickly find my friends and contacts there I tend to stick around because it's my network, not the tool or service itself, which is useful and valuable to me.

Recently, Twitter has been the service that's got me more free drinks than all the others combined...

--> Read the rest of this post over on the Headshift blog