Earlier today I was trying to help a client choose which Social Media Monitoring platform they should decide on. To be honest I thought it seemed pretty confusing (and i’m supposed to know what I’m doing!). So I thought perhaps I should write a little guide book to what’s available, what each offers and to perhaps share my feelings about which I prefer and why.

You can find the guide in my “downloads” section. Have a look, it may make choosing a lot simpler.

The other day I was driving along and stopped behind a van which had company name and contact details on it and this made me think about how we expect customers to find un online…

Now, we all have different ways of guessing company URLs – but in each case the basic common sense rules apply. Make it short, make it simple and above all else make it obvious.

I don’t know about you but if I owned Titan I certainly wouldn’t want my URL to be www.titancivilengltd.co.uk as this is clearly some sort of code to make it has difficult as possible for anyone to find!

Bear this in mind when choosing your own URL.

I don’t know about you, but when I look at my “All Updates” stream on LinkedIn it seems to be split 50/50 between people who add value, and those who…well, talk s^%t.

The thing about LinkedIn and in fact social media as a whole is that it’s a world where you can form new friendships, strengthen old friendships and have conversations. Sadly though many people seem to think that whilst they don’t listen to what anyone else is saying, everyone will be listening to them. I dread to think what they must be like as a party guest!

I know some people that have got many thousands of connections but I don’t really see how this can work for them – I assume either that they spend hours every day looking at their network or they just don’t listen to what anyone else ever says…I mean, how could they?

Anyway I’ve started going through deleting the ‘broadcasters’ or at least some of them from my connections and with a bit of luck, my life!

My aim is to get down to a manageable number of connections (750-1000) that I can have a meaningful and fruitful relationship with…well, that’s the plan anyway!

I can’t remember where I saw this, but it did make me chuckle…and whilst it’s a cynical view of social media it does have more than a few grains of truth in it! (click to enlarge)

Is it just me or do other people think that this bloody madness.

Currently Greece is undergoing all sorts of national trauma becasue they need a bail out from members of the IMF. They need this money for what? Infrastructure? Health service? Education|? Military?…no, because they can’t pay their outstanding debts.

So let me get this right. Greece has been living beyond its means for the last decade, borrowing money on the international markets in order that the bloated public sector can pay bloated wages to their (I should think) bloated workers…

This is like taking out a new credit card and withdrawing money from the cash machine to take in to the bank to pay your credit card bills that are now due.

Despite having given Greece E110bn in 2010, they need more. Primarily because they are still spending more money than they make.

Why don’t we just write off all debts to failing economies, give them no more support and learn our lessons (no matter how painful) and move on.

Every economy needs to be able to stand on its own feet, cutting it’s suit according to its cloth so to speak, if we keep lending money the problem wont go away it will just escalate once again.

Either that or we take their land in payment…at least we would all be able to go away on a sunny holiday then (in the UK)!

My kids are really in to Harry Potter. Replica wands, loads of lego, books, DVDs, props…most recently tickets for a tour of the studios…oh they love it!

But whether you love it or hate it, I think there’s a lesson here for all of us about a) a structured and coherent marketing campaign and b) holding-on to a vision of doing things properly.

Clearly there has been some serious thought put in to phasing the release of films, DVDs, merchandise and network TV releases of the Harry Potter machine. It seems that just as there looks like being a hiatus in the excitement, something else happens. And now that all 7 films have been released on DVD and Harry Potterworld is open and the studio tours are about to start talk is starting of an adaptation of JK Rowlings short stories “The Tales of Beedle the Bard”.

As for doing things properly, it would seem that the attention to detail for the whole film series has been outstanding…even by Hollywood standards. JK Rowling kept an incredibly tight grasp on what she would allow, English actors, made in England, how the sets looked and would be shot, how the screenplay was written…and nothing has been left to chance. Even down to programmes being helpd by spectators in the Quiddich world cup being designed as if they were real programmes!

But, the end result is the most successful movie phenomenon of all time, netting JK over £500 million pounds…and climbing.

Not bad for a girl who only 15 years ago scrabbling around to pay her rent and buy a cup of tea! Such a meteoric rise make me suspect that she modeled the evil Voldermort on herself!

Apple’s design supremo has finally got what he deserves…a knighthood!

For the best part of two decades Jony (an Essex boy) has been working for apple creating some of their most iconic designs…the iPod, the MacBook and of course the iPhone.  For many years he has been one of a very small band of people able to stand-up to Steve Jobs (RIP) with the result that his vision is the one that Apple now is realising.

Nice to see that a british lad can go to the US, conquer silicon valley and get recognised for it by HM!

Over the last year I have been asked many times for my thought on free online, cloud based apps and low cost tools to help small businesses appear to be profession without having to invest huge sums in software.

So I’ve written a little guide which you can see here!

I’ve just started using the iTunes Match service, that is to say that I subscribed and it is currently churning through all of my albums and uploading all of the ones which aren’t on the iTunes library…which seems to be about 6,000.

There seem to have been a plethora of teething troubles with getting the service working, many forum posts talk about iTunes just ‘hanging’ and becoming unresponsive but it may just be that if there are a lot of tracks to process it takes quite a while.

The basic idea is that if you have bought loads of CDs youshould be able to access that music from anywhere and not have to reload it on to loads of machines…all you need is a network connection. So, to save having to load all of your music (nearly 20,000 tracks in my case) in to the cloud, your tracks are checked agains Apple’s own library and if a match is found, their track (digitised at the highest quality) is the one which is used.

Brilliant in theory, but it relies on a very robust network connection to be seamless and (like in my case) the Apple library isn’t 100% complete…we shall see how things develop.

Are you familiar with TED talks?

If so, great, if not google it and have a look. Inspirational, educational, informative and thought provoking. Everything that good talks should be.

I think that for most people, there will be several talks that are helpful…for me there are many.

At present, one of the things that is really interesting is the work being done by Nicholas Christakis who has spent the last 10 years analyzing the dynamics of human networks. His work is, at first, a little confusing but nonetheless fascinating and it started me thinking about how the research that has has produced could perhaps help individuals and businesses develop their networks in a simultaneously more random and more beneficial way.

His thinking goes a little like this.

The Friendship Paradox – [says that] your friends have more friends than you do! Although this may be a little hard to intuitively swallow, I will have a go at explaining.

If you ask people to recommend a friend, the friends they suggest are [statistically] better connected than they themselves are. The reason this happens is that if you imagine two people one (person A) is very well connected (with say 100 friends) the other (person B) is poorly connected with just a single friend.

If you asked a random sample of people to recommend a friend, person A would be 100 times more likely to be recommended than person B. This is the essence of the way that networks work. Anybody chosen at random is (by statistical nature) more likely to recommend people who are more, rather than less, popular than themselves.

If this is true (and I am led to believe that it is), then there must be some way we can take this and use it to grown our networks and influence in a more enriching rather than diluting way.

I already have the answer (I think) and will post that next time!