Our social media activity is now award winning!

After a rather speedy taxi ride to the Oxford Belfry on Friday night the UoB digital team attended the CIPR PRide Awards (yes, the uppercase R is on purpose)! The evening was fantastic and we walked away with a Silver Award for 'Best use of Social Media'. A fantastic endorsement of the work that the digital team have put in over the last 12 months and hopefully enough of a reward to spur us all on to win again next year!

Congratulations to the team, we'll now need to find more space on the wall alongside our other awards!

Socialnomics...

A quick posting to highlight the latest revision of the Socialnomics video from Erik Qualman. I posted the original version a few months back and have used it in presentations as a good intro to social newbies... Enjoy!

Google have been rather busy...

By now i'm sure most people have at least heard of the +1 button from Google, we're currently working out where to put it on our websites for a trial run.

But, alongside the announcement of +1 comes two more interesting and rather low key releases. The first being Google+ and the second being Google's addition of social media tracking within Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.

Google+ appears to be the latest social networking attempt from Google and will hopefully take into account the lessons learnt from Buzz & Wave! The idea involves a number of strands, listed below and will be available on your mobile (Android, Apple, Blackberry, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Mobile) through a mixture of native apps and web apps.

Circles - An interesting way of sorting your contact into more manageable groups, family in one circle, friends in another.

Instant Upload - I love this idea, I already have an expanded Picasa account and it's pretty obvious that this will have some tie-in further down the line. The idea being that all those photos and videos you have on your mobile can be stored on Google+ in a private album. The best part is that the upload happens automatically, no need to remember to upload manually!

Sparks - Hmmmm, search & RSS combined maybe?

Huddle - A group texting facility sounds interesting, i'm assuming there will be a heavy tie in with Google Voice at some point.

Hangouts - Rolled into the whole package is also Video chat (a swipe at Skype/Facebook?) that you can use between selected friends or whole groups of people.

At the moment it's in limited release but you can register your interest here:

• Google+ interest page

The second roll out is additional code for Google Analytics, not as visually exciting as Google+ but looks great for anyone interested in +1, Like and Tweet action!

Tracking is listed under a new 'Social' navigation option and appears to only be available via the new version of Analytics. If you fancy having a go then you can find further details below: 

• Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools overview via Mashable
• Social Interaction Tracking Code via Google

 

Snow, snow everywhere!

Crikey it's chilly outside! As we're all freezing in the winter weather I thought i'd do a very quick posting on how brilliant social networks are during extreme times! I've been amazed at how well some things work when you're mobile and how integrated they have become to my life. I have a variety of social tools at my finger tips from my mobile phone, Foursquare, Latitude, Facebook, Sat Nav, Weather reports! So, a typical journey into work today:

• Check the weather report before heading out, it's not looking too bad.

• Dig the car out, take a photo of the dash saying it's -11.5 outside and post it to Facebook.

• Manage to get to the petrol station to fill up in case the journey home takes 4 hours like last year! Check in via Foursquare, i'm only 1 day away from being Mayor apparently... the same as yesterday!

• Start up Google Navigation (Beta!) and check out the traffic reports for the journey to work, it's as bad as expected!

• Finally get in and not have to worry about telling anyone as they're all following me on Latitude!

The wonders of modern technology!

Social Media Revolution

Interesting video on Social Media not being a fad! Plus some rather interesting stats on the growth rate of social media compared to traditional!

Facebook Location launching next week?

A rumour seems to be going round that Facebook is about to launch their long awaited location service. Initially slated for earlier in the year and delayed due to the on-going saga of privacy settings it now looks as though we may be ready to try out this new service.

Details are pretty shady at the moment about what exactly Facebook's new location service will be like, but it's likely the main way you'd share your location would be through your mobile device. This would obviously put it in direct (if not commercially competitive) competition with Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla.

The real question people will be asking is how the service will be used to display advertising? Will the location service allow us to deliver adverts in a more targeted way by geo-location? Could be rather interesting if it can...

Internet World 2010 update

So, i'm back from a pretty hectic day at Internet World 2010 and the emphasis has been on Content Management Systems. In total we had demo's of four systems, Alterian, Sitecore, Squiz and Vyre and they all offered relatively similar functionality but the two that stood out most for me were Squiz and Alterian.

Squiz is an Open Source product with a solid backing (the Australian government uses it) and a good support level.

Alterian is a CMS from a company we have currently shortlisted for Social Media Monitoring.

Both offer the sort of functionality we are now seriously interested in implementing such as personalisation of the website for visitors either with login details or via a cookie drop, multivariate testing of content, heuristic tailoring of content based on visitor profiling and closer integration of social media and web 2/3.0 functionality.

It's always a huge decision in deciding which CMS to go with and our current one has worked very well for us but visiting exhibitions and conferences does highlight just how quickly technology has moved on and we're starting to look a little dated. It's the ever elusive quest for perfection and it'll take us a while to get there but it looks as though a replacement CMS may need to be on the cards... 

Internet World 2010 is running again tomorrow so if you have a chance to visit it's certainly worth a look around!

Meltwater Buzz Vs Alterian SM2

So, I had a call from Meltwater Buzz about some new Social Media monitoring software they're selling and how we can use it to fine tune our Social Media Strategy... I took the demo tour as we have been thinking about expanding on our monitoring from the normal Google Alerts we use to something a little more sophisticated. It all looked really good, the reporting was well done and offered some valuable insight into the demo site (Lego!) and how they were performing.

So, I asked for a costing and started my usual round of relentless research before purchasing anything new. The price from Meltwater Buzz landed in my inbox and it's not that bad but would still knock out a chunk of my budget... the research continues! Then I find myself looking at a demo video of Alterian SM2 with the option of a Freemium account, so I sign up for one and guess what I find! It's the exact same system as Meltwater Buzz... even down to the format of reports, colour scheme, layout, everything is the same apart from the logo at the top.

So, it seems that Meltwater Buzz is actually just Alterian SM2 with the Meltwater logo on and a mark up of 50% on the price!

So, if you're happy with trying out this functionality on a Freemium account (5 search terms but limited to 1,000 results) head over to Alterian SM2 for an account, if you like it you can always upgrade for a Premium account. If you would rather have a Meltwater Buzz account (5 search terms, unlimited results) head over to the Meltwater Buzz site.

I've included the slides for SM2 below to show some of the functionality and they have additional resources and a free account on their website.

Sm2 Analysis Guide

View more presentations from Martin Edic.

Anyone else looking at Social Media monitoring software and is there anything available that might be of use to a marketing audience?

2.16 billion minutes spent updating statuses...

Crickey, that's a lot of time spent on your mobile phone... According to GSMA the UK mobile market ran up 6.7 billion page views on their mobile phone with 2.16 billion minutes spent updating statuses on Facebook! I'm not sure if I should be impressed or slightly concerned for the mobile browsing habits of the UK population!

It does however throw up some interesting questions in relation to users access our sites on a mobile device. We have certainly seen an increase in this trend in the last year or so and for January 2010 we had 1.33% of all of our site visits on a mobile device. So, do we need to rush out and create a new mobile version of our website... probably not just yet. Once we start looking into it we find that the majority of these visits are iphone/ipod users and luckily our site displays rather nicely already.

We all know that the web is heading towards mobile access at break neck speed but as a site manager it's good to know that the display of our current sites, with the application of good mobile browsers, don't display too poorly. The big step will be looking at the future of mobile browsing. Could augmented reality be the next big thing, with a link to an overlayed map of the campus from the website for mobile users? It's not too hard to imagine...

Finally, it only accessed our site twice in January but isn't 'Danger Hiptop' (aka the T-Mobile Sidekick) a brilliant name for a mobile device!

Google Alerts can find some interesting things!

I have a Google Alert set up to scan for anything that references 'University of Bedfordshire' and it can sometimes flag up some interesting things we wouldn't normally know about. A Google Alert will scan the web, news, blogs listed in the search results of Google for your pre-defined keywords an then email you the links to anything that matches. The one that dropped into my mailbox this morning included a link to a Flickr account with an aerial photograph of our Bedford campus.

It's a free service, you can schedule in how often you are emailed and it can act as an early warning on any negative news. This gives you the perfect opportunity to reply quickly and ensure situations don't get out of control. If you don't already have one set up head to the Google Alerts page for more information and remember that you can set up alerts on competitor keywords as well!