A chat about W00tonomy with Tony Purcell April 15, 2008
Posted by David Petherick in : Live, Utterances, brand, digital biographer, mobile, share, social media, sound, streams ,
I had a chat with Tony Purcell of W00tonomy, and though it’d be nice to share it…
Tony has started the first ‘content marketing’ company in Scotland, with the wonderful name of W00tonomy, and found out a little more about where they add value where strategy meets online marketing in the social media sphere.
See http://www.w00tonomy.com/ for more information.
Mobile post sent by davidpetherick using Utterz. Replies. mp3
I am an Author for “Age of Conversation: Why Don’t People Get It?”. March 24, 2008
Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, authors, blonging, brand, digital biographer, share, social media ,274 authors, and I, are going to write a sequel to the hugely successful ‘Age of Conversation‘.
The details about this book, along with a full list of authors, and links to their blogs or sites, is here on Drew McLellan’s blog, and at Gavin Heaton’s Servant of Chaos.
I’m really flattered to be on the same page as some of those names - as one commented suggested, why not just call it “Who’s Who in Social Media?”.
By the way, you should buy the Age of Conversation from Amazon on March 29th, as 1) We’re aiming to get it into the Amazon Bestsellers list and 2) Aiming to raise a sh*tload of cash for charity.
Interesting but useless fact: there are Ten David’s on the author list, Eight Pauls, Three Matts, and Five Johns…
Digital Biographer moooving in the right direction… February 9, 2008
Posted by David Petherick in : Utterances, authors, brand, corporate blogs, digital biographer, googlicious, online identity, share, social media, sound, streams ,You may have noticed some sound files being added to this blog over the past few days. Well, you’re not alone - the people who run Utterz.com seem to have noticed too, and have created a rotating banner for the site that advertises my content.
I am deeply flattered, and felt the need to reciprocate the attention by writing a little about the site - click the image below to see why I find Utterz such a useful resource to enhance my personal brand online, and do add your own comments when you see the full-size image - you can do so easily thanks to the great Skitch application. I also enjoy the humorous cow metaphor subtly used throughout the site, where Utterz = Udders (Geddit?), so you can ‘be herd, add ‘mooving’ pictures etc.
My Utterz Profile: http://www.utterz.com/~h-davidpetherick/profile.php
HTTV Shortcut: http://httv.biz/utterz/
Why it’s taken me 13 years to decide to attend The Next Web this April in Amsterdam… February 4, 2008
Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, Conferences, Radio, TV, brand, digital biographer, share, social media, startup, thenextweb ,I first got involved in online business around 1995, when I first bought a copy of .net magazine, after I got curious about a startup company in the next room of our business centre, who said they were hosting websites.
Back in 1995, most business people I spoke to didn’t know what a website was, let alone what a good one would look like, so I started to learn how to code HTML using a highly sophisticated tool called ‘Notepad‘, and registered some domain names where a committee of actual people decided on whether or not I could own a particular domain name…
By 1998, I was designing and managing sites for companies like The Alba Centre (a Silicon Glen incubator) Scottish Financial Enterprise, The British Blood Transfusion Society, and for dozens of conferences a year.
Of course, the dot com bubble burst around 2000-2001, with so much money following ridiculously optimistic business plans, but many survivors from that period are still strong and active today.
Here comes something new…
But around about 2003, a new type of web site started to appear, as what I considered to be a natural evolution coinciding with the high penetration of broadband internet connections into homes and businesses: sites with features that broadly are known as Web 2.0…
These sites allowed the addition of comment, collaboration, and content from those that use the sites. Blogs began to break news ahead of mainstream media, comments about a book by readers offered more credibility than publishers’ puff, and people began to use video sharing, file sharing, mobile access… and social networks.
Where we stand today, site concepts and names that did not exist a few short years ago are massively successful, and the numbers in monetary terms, and this time around, also in end user terms, are massive. YouTube. Facebook. MySpace. PayPal. Skype. Last.fm. Bebo. And the older companies (hardly business veterans, any of them) still have some smart moves and serious revenue - Amazon, EBay, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft.
New entities like Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Pownce, Slide, Notchup and Ning are growing rapidly in online areas that simply could not be conceived a few years ago. The barriers to entry for sites that can grow virally are lower than they ever have been before, and a new breed of VC is eager to find and fund the next big success - and these VCs are not just in the Valley. They are in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich, Milan, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Dublin, and beyond…
The Next Web HotSpot
This combination of factors forms the business and intellectual hot spot where The Next Web has grown since its inaugural conference in Amsterdam in 2006. This is the showcase for the best of the new web, debating the next moves, providing a forum for the key thinkers, best commentators and important players to meet, and creating a momentum in its own right that has led to thenextweb blog becoming a highly regarded source of news and critical commentary for entrepreneurial startups, VCs and industry commentators in Europe and beyond.
Last year’s Next Web conference included speakers such as Scott Rafer, CEO of MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo), Rod Beckström, author of the #4 best business book of 2006 (Amazon Editors’ Picks). Deborah Schultz, former Marketing Director for Six Apart, Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, one of the most influential individuals and investors in the Web 2.0 sphere, Marc Canter, founder of MacroMind and Broadband Mechanics, Tariq Krim, founder and CEO of Netvibes, Felix Petersen, founder and CEO of Plazes.com, Saul Klein, Venture Partner at Index Ventures, VP of Skype and a Founding Partner of the OpenCoffee Club, Tapan Bhat, Yahoo!’s vice president of Front Doors, driving strategy, product management and programming for the primary starting points to Yahoo!, Jeff Clavier, one of Silicon Valleys finest, most respected and leading investors.
This year… more than 700 delegates are anticipated from over 20 countries, and confirmed speakersRobert Scoble, Tech Geek Blogger & Author of ‘Naked Conversations‘, Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, and Gil Penchina, CEO at Wikia, and Leah Culver, Co-founder and Lead Developer of Pownce, a social messaging application.
Amsterdam’s ease of access from all over Europe, its cosmopolitan charm and essential cool also add to the list of very good reasons to attend this compelling conference.
Those on the organisers’ wish-list (to be confirmed) include Meg Whitman, President and CEO, eBay; Marissa Mayer - Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google; John Battelle - Author ‘The Search’; Esther Dyson; Loïc Le Meur - Executive Vice President and General Manager Six Apart Europe, Marc Andreessen - Serial Entrepreneur, founder of Netscape; Kathy Sierra - co-creator of the bestselling Head First series; Nicolas Negroponte - co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the MIT Media Laboratory; Eric Meyer - Standards Evangelist; Jason Fried - co-founder, 37signals.com; Kevin Rose - Founder and Chief Architect Digg; Dave Sifry - CEO, technorati; Jon Udell - Web/Internet consultant and author; Jeff Jarvis - Blogger, journalist, publisher and columnist; Chris Anderson - Author ‘The Long Tail’ Jim Clark - Serial Entrepreneur (Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, etc); Dave Winer - Software developer, author, blogger.
The time is now…
I’m going to be there, because I can’t think of a more interesting and exciting time for developments in the online sphere. Everything is in flux, and the recent aggressive takeover bid for Yahoo! from Microsoft just goes to show that change, evolution and revolution have become ‘business as usual’.
The inexorable rise in online commerce (97% of those online in the UK bought online in 2007) lets everyone know that the new business battlegrounds are almost all digital, and this conference focuses on who’s going to be providing the tactics, the new weapons, and where the battle lines will be drawn.
Two years ago, around 10 percent of the world’s population (627 million) had shopped online. Today, this figure is up 40 percent to 875 million. Source: The Neilsen Company
See you at The Next Web. Visit
http://2008.thenextweb.org/register/ to register - Early Bird Registrants save €200 on registration for this 2-day event.
- Follow The Next Web at Twitter - http://twitter.com/nextweblog
Competition - Name the proposed Microsoft / Yahoo combine February 1, 2008
Posted by David Petherick in : awards, brand, share ,Competition: What would you call the combined Microsoft / Yahoo?
Best answer wins a year’s free hosting from Certain Host. Competition closes Friday 8th Feb. Enter here with a comment at http://also.cc
Facebook Business Pages are GO for Search Marketing: they now get Page 1 at Google January 31, 2008
Posted by David Petherick in : brand, digital biographer, facebook, googlicious, mobile search, online identity, search marketing ,A few weeks ago, Facebook changed something slightly. They made their business pages and personal listings include an extra section in their centre, with the subject of the page written in there. Why? Search visibility.
Previously, my Facebook page was at
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=850265552
Now, it’s at
http://www.facebook.com/people/David_Petherick/850265552
So what? Well, OK, so it’s easier to remember - but it’s also visible to search. The old one still works, but the new one is in the top 20 for a Google Search for my name between long-standing entries at Association For Community Networking and 43 Things.
My Business Page for Certain Host is right up on Google, as you can see below - and that’s a search with more than 7 million pages in my wake.
So if you want to be found for a specific search term, just add a page to facebook, name it accordingly, and convert your customers from there. There is a catch though - I can’t edit my Business Pages on Facebook this evening. I suspect the reason is because this news is spreading…
How is your business page doing on facebook? Got many fans yet? What are you going to do to monetise it, manage it, and keep it fresh?
http://facebook.digitalbiographer.com arrives 12th February 2008.
Marketers wake up to social networking, but they still don’t smell the coffee. January 26, 2008
Posted by Thomas Power in : 2.0, brand, corporate blogs, digital biographer, ecademy, facebook, social media ,From Guest Blogger Thomas Power, Chairman, Ecademy.
Originally published 15th January 2008 at Ecademy.
The significance of social networks is now starting to become obvious to the marketing departments of larger companies, largely due to two factors - 1) Traditional advertising channels are proving less and less effective and 2) Marketing and advertising agencies have started to realise where people are spending their time.
They have seen the writing on the wall - with one particular statistic likely to be a challenge for many a marketing manager: “Social networks will become the dominant channel for viral marketing campaigns - email has been the dominant channel for viral marketing campaigns since the mid 90s, but social networks will overtake it in 2008.”
Another fact that’s staring marketers in the face - a tipping point that only has one further hurdle to clear: “In October 2007, Social Networks accounted for 7.7% of upstream Internet traffic to all other websites, making the category the second most important source of traffic after Search Engines.”
The next hurdle of course is for social networks to become a more important source of traffic than search engines. That’s a whole blog of its own, however.
An article in this morning’s Financial Times is entitled “Business urged to woo social network figures“, and uses language very firmly couched in the tradition of ‘moving product’ and the pages of publications such as ‘Campaign‘. This all suggests to me that although businesses may have woken up, they have not actually smelt the coffee - they still have the urge to sell cereals.
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