Great event combines my passion for social media and motorcycles

I’m pleased to say that I’ll be one of the speakers at Torque Social, which is a new social media event dedicated to the motorcycle industry. It runs from Thursday 9th February until Friday 10th February 2012 at The Manor House Hotel in Gloucestershire, and should be a fantastic event as it combines two of the biggest passions in my life – using new technology to benefit businesses and their customers, and motorcycles.

Incidentally, if you book before December 16th, 2011, you can save up to £124 on tickets. And in addition to the focus of the event on explaining how to get real returns on using social media and technology, there’s also a networking dinner and the chance to grab 1-to-1 sessions with the speakers, meaning you can come away with really specific advice and actions for your business.

Social Media is perfect for motorcycling:

Without wanting to give too many spoilers as to what I’ll be running a seminar on, it’s great to see the motorcycle industry starting to embrace social media as a way to engage with their customers. Motorcyclists are some of the most passionate, knowledgable, and enthusiastic people on the planet when it comes to spending time and money on their hobby, but also sharing their love with other people.

And there’s always been a social aspect, whether it’s ride-outs, bike meets, or the experience of being part of a convoy of hundreds of bikers heading to an event. And along with the usual age, location and other social strata, there’s the fact that motorcyclists handily tend to divide themselves into groups by the type of bike they ride, and often the make and model.

Add the fact that most bikers are also keen on gadgets and technology, hence the huge number of forums and messageboards that have been around for many years, and the fact biking often becomes part of life rather than a hobby, and you can see the massive opportunities, especially as motorcycling is often under pressure from outside forces, such as Government legislation.

Plus, bikes are cool.

 

If you’re in or near Nottingham tonight or Birmingham tomorrow…

You really, really should try and make it along to see the President and Founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman speaking. He’s also in Edinburgh on August 26th and 28th. You can see more details via Stallman’s schedule on the FSF website.

And if you’re not aware of who he is, just skim through the Wikipedia entry for starters.

Regardless of the opinions that he may be difficult to get along with, or whether we should be calling it Free Software or Open Source etc, the fact is that without his work and inspiration, we might not have any of the amazing software which has been produced under the range of ‘Copyleft’ and similar licences, enabling anyone to work with, change, adapt and modify code and evolve it.

I’m not a developer, but every day I’m thankful for Linux, Ubuntu, Open Office, Gimp, WordPress and more. And I’m still working out if I can jump in a car tonight, especially after reading his biography (available as a free download from the FSF website, updated with copious notes from Stallman himself). There’s a wealth of great quotes about Stallman, and the one chosen by Wikipedia is fairly appropriate from the impression I’ve had:

There’s something comforting about Stallman’s intransigence. Win or lose, Stallman will never give up. He’ll be the stubbornest mule on the farm until the day he dies. Call it fixity of purpose, or just plain cussedness, his single-minded commitment and brutal honesty are refreshing in a world of spin-meisters and multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns.

—Andrew Leonard, Salon.com

Nice feedback on my ALPSP presentation…

Always good to get some nice feedback…

‘Dan Thornton provided a particularly insightful introduction to online
communities at a recent ALPSP seminar. The detailed analysis of the
available options for publishing in its varied forms provided an exciting
launch pad for the day itself and provided food for thought for the many
academic publishers attending the event.’

Nick Evans, Chief Operating Officer, Association of Learned and Professional
Society Publishers (www.alpsp.org)

The slides in question are ‘Building online communities to support successful media brands’.

Real life socialising

I try not to blog during work time, but as work is a 24/7 obsession at the moment (a side effect of loving my job and having lots to do!), I’ve fallen a bit behind with updating – something I really need to be more organised about. There are lots of bloggers concerned that their output has fallen due to so much time on Twitter, so I’ll claim my share of that excuse as well…

The other reason I haven’t been about as much is that I’ve had a couple of real life events which are pretty interesting.

The first was the inaugral MeasurementCamp meeting, driven by an idea of Will McInnes. It’s a great idea to share requirements, needs, concerns etc in the emerging social market, focused around how we actually report on our efforts, and bringing together software vendors, agencies, and clients (Which is where I fit in – although my work internally mirrors a lot of agency work).

What’s great is that it’s open, informal, and within five minutes of sitting down it was becoming clear that everyone shared pretty similar needs/requirements, despite everyone working independently. Which is reassuring if you’re trying to break new ground within your organisation. And it’s also going to provide a great frame of reference for everyone within the industry. It’s definitely one of the more valuable events I’ve attended…

And speaking of events I’m involved with…

I’ll be at Mediacamp Bucks 08 on May 17, 2008, and not only will I be attending, but I’ve found myself volunteering to lead a session. Mediacamp is interesting, because it’s “An un-conference digging on advertising, blogging, web-dev, branding, new and social media”.

So luckily for everyone I’m not going to be standing up and talking at people for an hour – it’s about everyone being involved and exchanging information, opinion, knowledge etc. The biggest downside of volunteering for a sessions really is the fact there’s already one session at the same time that I’d love to attend!

It’s another event that’s open to all and free to attend – which means I get the chance to learn from anyone – and it seems pretty well organised by the Social Media Mafia…

If you’re interested, I’m running a session on “From Personal Blogging to Corporate Responsibility – from social media for fun to managerial demands.”, basically looking at the implications as more and more companies seek to engage in community and blogging, and the implications that’s had for me and other people on a personal level, as something done as a hobby for fun, or as a side project with little managerial involvement suddenly becomes something which is integrated and backed by entire companies.

Oh, and in the spirit of community, open-source, free access, and the fact he made me feel guilty, I should probably mentioned and link to the designer of the above logo (and several other cool Mediacamp ones), Eaon Pritchard.

So it’s a hectic time, but a really, really good one. Throw in impending fatherhood in the next week or two, and you’ll hopefully be sympathetic if there aren’t daily updates here – you can always find me on Twitter to ensure I haven’t dropped off the ‘net entirely…