My new motto

October 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Despite previously ranting about ‘personal brands‘, I figured it was worth sharing a new motto I’m going to be adhering to, from this day forth.

It paraphrases two people who are notable for imparting great wisdom – Seth Godin, and Randall Graves. And obviously there will be a full press conference and press release available shortly for the official unveiling.

So here it is:

‘Ship, or get off the pot’.

I thank you all for your interest. If you have any questions please email them to an address which will be mostly ignored, or occasionally checked by someone who won’t care unless you work for a national newspaper.

For a more eloquent, thoughtful and reasoned bit of thinking, check this video of Seth Godin out:

HT – Simon Andrews.

Filed Under: strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Don't write Yammer off yet

October 21, 2009 By 4 Comments

This is the first post by new contributor Lauren Fisher, who specialises in online PR and social media at Simply Zesty – and can be found on Twitter at @laurenfisher.

Yammer seemingly suffered the fate of many internet startups. It benefited from the initial buzz of being a new brand, with the handy association of both microblogging and launching at TC50 , but failed to retain the traffic. The site traffic for the ‘Twitter for companies’ has been largely unstable, certainly not following an upward trend, failing to get anywhere near the initial 200k visits it reached on its launch in September 2008.
For many of us, Yammer was exciting for a few days, before we neglected the site and focused our full attention back to Twitter. I don’t think we should write Yammer off just yet though. Yammer is not like most social media tools out there, because it’s focused primarily on companies. I believe this is the key to why it’s success has been slow.
Affecting change in a corporate environment is still an incredibly slow process. Sure there would have been one or two social media heads within organisations that would have been embraced it, but this isn’t sufficient for the service to function properly. If there’s only a few of you using it, you might as well just DM each other on Twitter.
There are also issues of security. I remember talking to someone in a pharmaecutical company who was effectively using the site with a number of her employees. Then IT caught wind of this and blocked access to the site amid concerns of privacy. But although this highlights the nature of trying to introduce social tools within companies, I don’t think Yammer should be written off just yet .
Another reason to keep an eye on it? Two interesting moves. In August of this year the company moved closer to Silicon Valley, and shortly after was joined by Sean Parker, Founding President of Facebook,  and co-founder Napster and Plaxo. Not a bad name to have to your company and a sure sign that there’s more to come from Yammer.

Filed Under: Microblogging Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Don’t forget Social Media in Business this Friday…

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The Social Media in Business conference takes place this Friday in London, and you can still save on the already reasonable price of a ticket to the one day event (£161) , by using the discount code MAFIADAN when you order for 15% off.

There’s a great line-up of people, and I’m still hoping to attend (work schedule permitting!). I wrote more about the line-up in a previous post.

Filed Under: events Tagged With: , , , , ,

The best way to publish RSS feeds to Twitter?

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

If you’re looking to publish any RSS feeds to a Twitter account, then apparently you wouldn’t be alone in picking Twitterfeed, as it’s apparently used by nearly 350,000 publishers.

Twitterfeed

Not only was it around the first default choice, but there are a host of changes now going live to improve the service.

If you publish on a system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds (e.g. Blogger or Typepad), your new posts should be live on Twitter in a matter of moments.

It now also features the option to publish to Facebook, which makes life a little easier.

And you get better analytics – there’s now integration with both url shortner Bit.ly, and Google Analytics.

And behind the scenes there’s an improved queue management system for greater reliability.

In fact, my only complain from a personal note is that the new design and system gives a variety of methods to log-in, and for some reason I’m struggling with mine!

Filed Under: Tools, twitter Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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