Category Archives: Personal Development

The beauty of TweetCamp

Posted on October 9, 2011 at 11:08 am UK

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Two of the overriding impressions I formed after taking part in yesterday’s TweetCamp in London is that Twitter is whatever people want it to be; and there’s no right or wrong way to use it, only effective and ineffective.

This was the second TweetCamp in London, the first being in 2009. TweetCamp is described as:

[...] a free-to-attend, participatory “unconference” for both new and experienced users of Twitter. It aims to bring digital practitioners together face to face in order to:

  • Accelerate conversations that happen via social media channels, such as Twitter
  • Deepen established online networks, and create new connections
  • Inspire fresh thinking, new collaborations, and innovation.

I estimate there were about 180 people at the venue in east London yesterday – the Bishop Challoner Catholic Collegiate School, a most excellent venue for this type of informal unconference event – and many of those I met had their own perspectives on what Twitter could help them achieve in how they connect with other people.

There were self-employed business people there. A few from big corporations. Teachers, community managers, video producers, writers, app developers, journalists, students, you name it – the variety in people, what they do and what they think was extraordinary.

Quite unlike TweetCamp 2009, now that I think of it – that was still early-adopter and enthusiast territory to a large extent. Two years on, it was time for the ‘normal’ folks who are liberated by their own notions of what Twitter is and what you can do with it.

That’s the beauty of TweetCamp – an informal gathering of people who see a social tool like Twitter as the means to achieve things on their terms; who want to share their perspectives as well as find out what others think. The conversations and discussions were vibrant and stimulating right from the start.

During the unconference sessions in the afternoon, I led one session with Sue Llewellyn that we entitled ‘Twitter Hits and Misses,’ during which we addressed such thorny matters as Twitter etiquette, cultural differences in how people use Twitter and some tips and tricks for using Twitter effectively. Some really good discussion with and among the 20 or so tweetcampers who took part.

Later I joined in a trenchant discussion about real-time news journalism, led by Sue, in a packed room. That discussion could have continued long beyond the 30-minute allocation for each session. I especially liked the talk on embargoes and is there a future for them, a topic that generated some hearty discussion.

I’m sure plenty will be posted in the coming days by others who were there yesterday, telling their stories and offering their impressions and opinions about the day. There will be lots of photos posted to Flickr and to Facebook. I’m looking forward to seeing all those perspectives that I’m sure will further enrich my own perspectives about Twitter, about people and the many different way people like to connect with others.

Keep track of everything via the hashtag: #tweetcamp. And connect with TweetCamp itself via the Twitter handle @TweetCamp.

A final word must go to the organizers of yesterday’s event. In a word, they are brilliant. Seamless organization – clearly the result of equally-seamless planning and preparation – made for an experience where everyone could focus on the content, as it were, and not whinge about how the wifi wasn’t working (typical of so many events that cost a fortune to go to). The wifi, in fact, was perfect: it worked! And that lets me add another thanks – the sponsors and partners, without whom TweetCamp wouldn’t have happened in the form it took (including free of cost to everyone).

A lot of people were behind the organizing scenes but I can’t find a list of everyone’s names (hopefully, there will be some acknowledgement of everyone on the TweetCamp site), so let me just thank the one individual who I connected with most leading up to the day – Abigail Harrison. Nice work.

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On board with The Huffington Post UK

Posted on July 2, 2011 at 1:13 pm UK

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In a few days time, an event takes place that marks another evolutionary milestone for the mainstream media – the launch of The Huffington Post UK edition on July 6.

The Huffington Post is a US news website and content aggregating blog founded in 2005 by Arianna Huffington and others. With origins as a liberal (in the American sense) political blog, it’s grown to embrace a wide and deep range of topics to cover, just like major mainstream media do. According to Alexa, it is the 26th highest-ranked website in the US. It gets over 36 millions page views a month – that’s more than The New York Times – and over a million comments. Key to its broad reach is a core group of journalists and contributors including American politicians and celebrities, plus a huge number of unpaid bloggers (over 9,000 in the US).

Earlier this year, it was acquired by AOL for $315 million. In May, the first international edition was launched in Canada. Now comes the UK; France and ten other countries follow later.

So what’s my interest in all this? Well, apart from being a reader of the Huffington Post (mostly tech and business content, not so much the politics), I’m going to be writing blog posts for the new UK edition. I’ll be joining bloggers that number “well into three figures” who are lined up to contribute, according to Chris Wimpress, political editor.

The business model for bloggers will be the same as in the US – you post as much or as little as you want, you own all rights to your content, and you don’t get paid. It’s very clear in the terms and conditions I’ve agreed to as will have every other blogger, and I’m perfectly ok with that.

So what’s in it for me? To a great extent, I see it as being part of a grand experiment, contributing my opinion and commentary on topics that interest me and that will be published in an online medium that has huge scale and reach. It offers an opportunity for such opinion and commentary to reach many people who, frankly, would be unlikely to visit my blog.

It also means that I’ll be writing for a mainstream medium. That traditionally means you need to be a journalist, which I’m not. I don’t know yet who any of the other bloggers are who’ll be writing for the UK edition, but my guess is that a majority will not be journalists.

How disruptive will this structure be in the overall scheme of things for the media in the UK? Will it lower or even demolish barriers to entry for anyone who wants to create and contribute content for other mainstream media? What will it do for the pay-for-access-to-content models such as that in place by News International’s Times and coming soon from other media groups, eg, the Telegraph? And what will the ‘journalism quotient’ add to the overall picture where some commentators don’t seem too impressed with what they’re seeing at the moment?

I suspect it will be hugely disruptive over time, assuming AOL don’t change the Huffington Post’s model and start a pay-for-content model themselves (and what would that do to the unpaid blogger relationship?).

But that’s all in the future and time will tell what actually happens. Meanwhile, I’ve got my user name and log in details, I’ve checked in to the Movable Type-powered site and reviewed things, so I’m largely ready to put finger to keyboard and write my first post. I plan to do that in time for the UK launch on July 6. Then, once a week. Depending on what I write, I may cross-post some of that content here.

Looking forward to being part of an interesting adventure.

FIR’s still a labour of love

Posted on June 5, 2011 at 11:15 am UK

On May 23, my podcasting partner Shel Holtz and I marked a milestone number for our weekly business podcast For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report, usually referred to simply as ‘FIR’ – episode number 600.

Many of our listeners had nice things to say about this anniversary of sorts, for which we’re grateful.

Shortly after FIR 600, Shel and I had a terrific conversation with Kelly Kass, the New York-based editor of Simply-Communicate.com, which appeared as an interview on May 31.

fir600interviewkellykass

Kelly’s woven a nice tale, one that I found a pretty compelling read – not because I’m one of the subjects of it but because it was nostalgic in how Kelly tells the story of the origins of FIR back in those early social media days in 2004 and 2005 and how the show has developed in the six years since our first episode in January 2005.

I was especially pleased how Kelly focused on an area that’s very important to both Shel and I – listeners and community

[...] With the ability to share links via FriendFeed, as well as connecting via the FIR website and Twitter page, Holtz and Hobson have successfully created a true community of listeners.

Survey results (compiled by Neville) have revealed that the average FIR listener can be anyone from a CEO to a university professor to a writer to an engineer. However, a typical listener profile would be a senior level communicator working in an organization or an agency.

Geographically, 48% of the show’s audience is in the US, with a range of listeners located in California, Minnesota, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Maryland and Vermont to name a few. The rest of the listening audience is located in the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland and “a sprinkling in other countries,” according to Hobson.

Some of those listeners have even turned into correspondents, as Holtz points out:

“We got our first correspondent after soliciting comments from listeners. Like clockwork, Lee Hopkins would send high-quality audio files after each show. Jokingly I said, ‘If we have one more response from this guy, we’re going to make him a correspondent. And we did!”

Other FIR correspondents include Dan York, who covers technology out of New Hampshire, as well as Michael Netzley who provides a PR perspective from Singapore.

fir600simplytvA few days ago, I took part in the June episode of Simply-TV, a one-hour business TV show that broadcasts on the internet each month, part of Marc Wright‘s London-based Simply-Communicate group. Marc’s on the left in the still from the show. (You can view the recording of this show for free but you first need to register.)

It was great fun! I was the first segment, as it were, and we talked about a wide range of FIR-related topics including how Shel and I got started, how we decide on content for each episode, whether podcasting has taken off or not as a business communication tool, and our plans for the future of FIR.

I stayed in the studio for the whole show as the other guest present was Silvia Cambie, a good friend of FIR, who had some pretty interesting things to say about her recent trip to Tunisia and her thoughts about the use of social media in the Arab world. (In July 2009, I interviewed Silvia and Yang-May Ooi for FIR about the book they both wrote, International Communications Strategy: Developments in Cross-Cultural Communications, PR and Social Media.)

So, just over 600 episodes of FIR are now under our belt. Naturally we’re focused on what comes next. To help us with that, we’re about to do a new listener survey, following the last one we published in May 2009; more news on that soon. We listen to what our listeners say about the show, so I’m looking forward to hearing their opinions.

And finally, let me acknowledge our superb sponsors with the texts we publish with each episode’s show notes:

FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com.

Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

Pollstream: helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.

Now to plan the next episode; normal service resumes with FIR 602 tomorrow June 6!

Thanks for listening.

Marking five years as a podcaster

Posted on January 3, 2010 at 8:55 am UK

FIR5years Today, January 3, 2010, is rather a special day for Shel Holz and I as it marks the fifth anniversary of For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report, the podcast we both started on January 3, 2005.

To me, that day five years ago often feels like it was only yesterday. Yet so much has happened in this time in our specific areas of interest that embrace a pretty broad spectrum of business, online communication and technology, on a global level.

We’ve grown from a single podcast five years ago to a podcast series that includes the occasional interviews with interesting people, book and other reviews, and more. We have correspondents in the USA, Singapore and the UK who contribute and add to the overall richness of content and community. And we have sponsors: Ragan Communications and CustomScoop.

Getting involved in podcasting has had a profound influence on me, both personally and professionally. I fell in love with audio, putting it simply.

As we produce FIR (as our primary shows is abbreviated to) on Mondays and Thursdays, we’ll be recording the fifth anniversary episode tomorrow Monday, January 4, at about 5pm UK time, our usual recording time.

If you’re a regular listener – especially if you’ve been listening since the early days – we’d love to hear from you. You can email us or call in a comment to the comment line: see the show notes of the latest episode for contact info. If you’ve joined the FIR community on Friendfeed, why not add some thoughts there.

If you get us your thoughts in time, we’ll include them in tomorrow’s show.

Meanwhile, here’s a blast from the past: FIR #1 on January 3, 2005 (MP3, 19.85Mb, 43:23)

Hope you enjoy it, and thanks for listening!

Spending most of a week in Sin City

Posted on November 28, 2009 at 9:40 pm UK

welcometolasvegas A bit of a dramatic headline, perhaps, but Sin City aka Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, is where I’m headed on Sunday morning on a  Virgin Atlantic flight where I’ll be for most of next week, back here in the UK on Thursday morning.

It’s been a few years since I was last in Vegas. Each time I’ve been there, it’s been on business and this upcoming trip is no different. So no ‘sin’ in sight yet I always have a feeling of excitement and wonder on a visit to a city that’s an icon, a Mecca, so to speak, for conspicuous consumption of every type imaginable.

As I’ll be wrapped up in meetings with Bob Pearson and many of my WeissComm colleagues, there’ll be little opportunity for sightseeing on The Strip even though we’ll be in a hotel on that same strip.

While in Las Vegas, I’ll be in the same time zone as my podcasting partner Shel Holtz., ie, Pacific Time. So in Monday’s episode of the FIR podcast, we’ll be recording at about 9am local time, with me on Skype from my hotel room. Actually, that’s the same time as we usually do it, equivalent to 5pm UK.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to some great days of planning and discussion as well as some socializing. It’s doubtful I’ll be posting much here while on the road. Lots on Twitter, though.