10-01-08

I know I should probably keep working on this, but…

Love this [via here]. That’s me on the right that is, quite a lot of the time.

09-28-08

Blogging FAIL

One of the top rules of blogging: never delete posted content, just update it.

Jason Calcanis has dropped a clanger with his predictions that “50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months” and to make matters worse – there’s a big ‘WTF’ resounding around the blogosphere as Silicon Alley Insider and others pulled their posts in which the contents of the original Calcanis email containing the predictions were published.

Perhaps everyone quickly agreed that predicting that 80% of the current start-up community will ‘shut down or go on life support’ was a bit much and not the most optimistic outlook for the industry, by the industry itself?

Here’s Loic wading in, on Seesmic, naturally. . .

09-01-08

Rise of the micro-agency continues

Today Stephen Davies (aka PRblogger.com) joins the growing list of former agency digital PR peeps to launch their own specialist agencies/consultancies with new venture 3WPR. I did the same in March this year with Shed and I haven’t looked back since. Yes, it’s a bit scary and strange at first but you soon get used to working differently and dealing with all that extra stuff that comes with setting up on your own.

Personally, I absolutely love the freedom and flexibility it gives you in your work. Since setting up Shed I’ve had the time to meet loads of really smart people, start working with a few of them and even cook up my own ideas for some web based things. As well as doing all that social media and digital stuff that I genuinely love.

Good luck Stephen and thanks for calling Shed disruptive.

PS It was Ged that called Shed a micro-agency and it’s kind of stuck in my mind.

08-21-08

UK bloggers and social media thoughts

(21/8 Quick update – in my haste to post I forgot to include the response from Shiny Media to the TechCrunch UK post referenced below that is well worth reading)

Wow. It’s all kicking off as the UK debates the success of (or lack of) UK blogs in making money and achieving high levels of traffic. Head on over to the original post on TechCrunch UK and get involved in some of those comments. Some very interesting stuff and personally, I think there’s another issue at stake here that this gives some really good insight into.

Scenario . . . You work in PR. You have a client that gets digital, wants to engage in social media and you’re all set to go, BUT – to your client only UK blogs, websites and other forms of social media matter. That’s because they have money that needs to be spent on the UK. The US team has money too, but they (and their US based agency) look after ‘the US’ and will handle the ‘big stuff’. You have to focus solely on UK bloggers and UK online media but the numbers don’t quite add up and there’s not really a decent selection of bloggers you’d recommend engaging with, or that you can find.

What’s the solution? Well, if you go with Ashley on the TechCrunch article then it looks quite complicated and will take a lot of time for the UK to catch up. A shorter term solution I think would be to make it easier to find decent UK blogs so that the space is much more clearly defined. For example BritBlog is closed now and you can’t search by country on blogcatalog. Yes, I know loads of blogs and bloggers through active participation in social media and occasionally someone will spend a bit of time pulling together lists of UK bloggers (often pulled from US/global lists) – but on the whole it feels a bit touch and go sometimes.

The need for absolute total integration of digital teams, budgets and social media activity is getting stronger all the time. There are no regional boundaries on the internet – it’s one big lovely thing and people don’t care which country their media comes from. They’re too busy getting everything for free and participating on the web.

So – the question is, do we try and work with clients to help unify their digital presence and belief in non-UK online media (if it’s important and valuable to them) or do we work together to try and make it easier for ourselves to establish a bigger, better UK blogging community and discover more niche, influential blogs? I think we should do both, but then it’s easy to say that and there’s loads of cool stuff happening already to help fuel the UK blogger community.

The next question is how and what we do in the meantime. Or you could just sack off ‘targeting’ altogether and focus on making your clients product or marketing so good that people will talk about it whatever country they’re in, without prompting.

01-21-08

Great tools for Mac-based bloggers

Problogger serves up a great list of tools you should check out if you haven’t already. Some on there I haven’t used and am going to check out. If I had to pick three completely indespensible ones mentioned it would be Imagewell, Cyberduck and Twitterific.

Iain has also just posted about MacHeist too. Loads of rather useful looking apps for just $49.

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