toodlepip - Sam Michel's blog and other miscellany

A Whistlestop Tour of Digital UK: Media Landscape & Company Clusters

Sam Michel — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:28:20 +0000

miscellany

A couple of weeks back I was asked to speak at TechWorld, a conference and expo organised by UK Trade & Investment. This year's event included the addition of the first TechCity Entrepreneur's Festival.

The week-long festival incorporated a bootcamp, access to investors, a giant get-together with Silicon Valley Comes to the UK, pitch training and a pitch competition. In the light of so many overseas companies heading in to London, I thought a whistlestop tour of the UK's digital sector, location of clusters and London, in particular might be handy.

Here's the presentation with all the research referenced. The work around the growth of micro-global firms from London Met university highlights a growing trend of international firms using London as their commercial base, using the relatively easy legal frameworks, access to capital/staff and timezone-friendly location to their advantage.

TechWorld - UK Digital Media Landscape Nov 2011

View more presentations from Chinwag

Like I say, just a whistlestop tour, given the chance it'd be good to pull together further information from outside of London. It's clear that the South East dominates the digital scene in pure numbers, but I'd love to get a sense of the health of the specialist clusters outside the M25.

Whilst I have to admit to some initial scepticism about TechCity, the focus on the area is definitely having an impact with the number of firms growing, between 250 and 600, depending on whose figures and methodology used. Either way, it's all in the right direction.

Having said that, the Tech in TechCity, might be slightly mis-leading with a large number of agencies and digital-focused agencies including UX, creative, strategy and marketing making up the numbers. One to watch, and let's hope it continues to grow, the UK's economy certainly needs the inward investment and youth employment shot-in-the-arm this initiative offers.

Photo (c) Duedil's London Startup Map. Originally posted on my blog at Chinwag.

sam michel

digital cluster

digital media landscape

tech world

ukti

techcity

Masturbation: A Lesson in Effective Corporate Communications

Sam Michel — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:37:37 +0000

marketing

Spotting this picture pop up in my Facebook feed, it was hard to resist following the link to the full story at The Poke, a collection of funny blogs, posts that bills itself as 'time well wasted'.

And it nicely follows on from my post a few weeks back about the folks at Flickr who I thought handled a fairly major server outage rather well.

I really hope that this isn't a fake. Or at least the deflty-handled response purported to be from the Director of Corporate Communications at St Andrews University, Niall Scott, who was asked to verify if notice which appeared on campus was legitimate.

Let's face it, it's a funny fake. And a po-faced official might have taken a dim view to a Freedom of Information request enquiring about the veracity of the notice. Mr Scott's response is a lesson in the art of a well-balance riposte of fact, humour and policy.

Taking into consideration the subject matter, there's so many ways this could've gone wrong and I wonder how long it took to knock out (pun very much intended) this response.

Well, played. Like I said, I really hope the response isn't a fake. The names check out and I've emailed Niall to double-check. In the meantime, here's a snippet of his response:

A strong clue that the notice is fake is the line “Please go home and masturbate if you are bored.” As a matter of policy, the University would never encourage students to go home during term time.
I understand that two copies of the notice were attached, with chewing gum, to doors of the male toilets in the University of St Andrews Main Library on or about the afternoon of Sunday November 13th 2011. The notices were removed by Library staff shortly afterwards.
Far from having a policy on masturbation or outlawing the practice, as the bogus notice alleged, the University encourages the study of it, academically at least. Among the titles in the University Library is “Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation” by Thomas Walter Laqueur, pub Zone Books, New York, 2003.
Available from the short loan section, and as of 3 p.m. this afternoon, one copy still available to borrow.

The full response is available in the original blog post on The Poke. It's worth a read.

UPDATE: Just heard back from Niall at St Andrew's University who confirms that the incident is true, and his response is genuine. Top work.

via Andrew Fawcett-Wolff & Craig Cockburn.

funny

masturbation

st andrews

corporate comms

corporate communications

humour

wit

How to Enable Google Plus (G+) for Google Apps. Finally!

Sam Michel — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:00:29 +0000

marketing

geekery

It always struck me as somewhat of a spectacular own goal that when Google launched Google Plus (G+) in late June 2011, that it wasn't available for the 4 million businesses coughing up real money for Google Apps, let alone those using them for free.

After the debacle when the big G prematurely launched Buzz to much criticism, this was the opposite end of the spectrum. Lock out the most engaged Google users, and those guaranteed to get the most from a new service. As you'd expect there was a fair bit of forum-based grumbling.

In order to get things working Google needed to roll-out profiles for Google Apps, which was announced matter-of-factly on their blog a couple of days ago. Considering the company's focus on being more social it's surprising they haven't made more of a song and dance about it...yet.

So, if like me, you'd been waiting to get your mitts on this and have a proper look-see without having to constantly login and logout of a personal Gmail account, here's a quick guide to setting it up (you can find the official Google guide here).

Setting up Google Plus (G+) for Google Apps Administrators

Step 1: Enable Google Profiles for Your Organisation

Login to to your domain's management console. If you use to access this from the link in the top right-hand corner of your Gmail account, you'll probably notice the link has disappeared. You can access the control panel directly using a URL.

The format is: http://www.google.com/a/domain.name

Next, select the Organization & users tab from the main menu then choose the Services option.

Scroll down to find the switch for Google+ at the bottom of the list of Google-branded services, see the screenshot below for an example.

Next up, there's a warning screen that essentially spells out, that by turning on Google+, you're letting your organisation's users control their profiles and get up to all sorts of mischief if they so wish. Probably a good time to check the company's social media policy.

Note the Turn Google+ on link is the text link, not the button.

Step 2: Individual Users Turn on Google+

So far, so good. Google+ is now turned on at the organisation level, but individual users need to enable their own account so they can use it. Just direct them to the main Google+ homepage at http://plus.google.com.

As long as they are signed in to their Google Apps account, they'll be prompted to create a profile and get cracking with Google+, it looks like this:

Et voila! Job done, your organisation's users will get access to all the Google+ goodies including: Profiles, Circles, Streams, Hangouts, Picasa Web Albums and Google+ mobile access.

For admins, Google provides a handy email template to let users know how to enable Google+ and learn more about its features. You'll find my profile here.

Photo (cc) keso s.

gmail

google

google+

google apps

social network

sharing

RIP Steve Jobs, the Geek Generation Loses Their John Lennon

Sam Michel — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:13:00 +0000

geekery

miscellany

RIP Steve Jobs.

I saw the news in the early hours of yesterday morning (UK time), whilst I was sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor trying to force conference badges through my (non-Apple) printer without much luck.

It was a rather surreal moment. We all knew he was ill, really ill, and judging by his last appearance, Steve Jobs, was fighting his illness, but it was proving to be a tough battle. Even so, the news was still unexpected and sheds light on the new Apple CEO's sombre performance at the iPhone launch the previous day.

It's very sad, for his family, and for the tech industry in general, but trying to get some perspective is difficult when every news outlet splashing the story across their front page, ticker and broadcasts. Predictably, social media went nuts.

In this maelstrom of media, trying to get some perspective is tricky, but maybe the impact is similar to the feeling when John Lennon was shot in 1980. I was too young to have realised the impact of that event, but it turns out, I'm not the only one to draw this comparison.

People connected with John Lennon as an artist, with a visceral connection to his work. Can Steve Jobs really be held compared? My answer: yes. If anything, for this generation maybe more so.

His innovation at the cross-roads of technology and design has re-defined an industry. A phone without buttons, probably inconceivable pre-iPhone, is now the de-facto standard. I won't bang on the products as I don't consider myself an Apple fanboy, although others may disagree, especially if I ever did an audit of the products I own.

Consider the revolutions (good or bad, you decide) - computing, telephony, music, tablets. An impressive legacy that has had massive impacts on both the creation and consumption of media.

There'll be lots written about Jobs...but in everything I really liked the post from Brian Lam, ex-editor of Gizmodo who was both friendly and locked horns with Jobs, when his blog covered a pre-release iPhone, lost by an Apple employee.

And for the inspiring side of Steve Jobs, his Stanford commencement speech:

steve jobs

apple

steve jobs rip

john lennon

When Things Break: How Flickr Communicated An Outage

Sam Michel — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 10:23:39 +0000

marketing

Fact of life: things break. Web services rely on power grids, complicated hardware, platters of material spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, and that's before the human element is factored in. Come to think of it, it's rather impressive that the whole thing is so reliable <superstitious>touches wood</superstitious>.

What defines an organisation is how they handle themselves when things go wrong. Do they ignore their customers? Deny there's a problem? Maintain a status page with red/amber/green icons? Communicate status via Twitter.

Here's how Flickr handled an outage this morning (BST), have to hand it to them, it's absolute class. A perfect balance of information and light-heartedness. I can forgive them the fact that some urgent updates to the conference site I'm working on will have to wait a few minutes.

Here's what greets you on the homepage:

Mysterious, but a quick look at their blog reveals:

and checking the @flickr twitter stream:

Yes, it's still a bit annoying that the service is down, but I do love their approach. If you're on a tighter deadline, it's probably more irritating, but I'm a big fan of whoever is putting together their copy. Very nice work indeed.

UPDATE:

And here's the results of the pics that flickr users uploaded whilst waiting for the site to come back up, flickr asked users to tag photos FlickrMassageOct2011.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I can't help thinking that if Facebook faced a similar outage, the response wouldn't be quite so positive. Flickr has an awful of goodwill despite Yahoo's best efforts to ignore the service.

Photo (c) Alford Charlie.

flickr

outage

18 Daft Facebook Buttons

Sam Michel — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:40:06 +0000

half-baked

In trying not to get distracted writing a blog post about the torrent of glossy new social features from Google+ and Facebook, I failed miserably. In fact, the rumours of new Facebook buttons: Watch, Want, Read plus a beverage or two start me thinking...but not too much.

Here's the result, 18 Facebook-style buttons you're unlikely to see - feel free to use on your blogs, etc - a credit and a link back here would be nice.

Yes, silly, I know. And I'm sure just the tip of the iceberg? Got any more ideas? Let me know in the comments.

<Blatant Advert>
As my colleague Mel has just pointed out, we are working on a rather fantastic Facebook Marketing conference and bootcamp taking place in a couple of weeks. If you're interested, there's more info here: Chinwag Insight: Facebook Marketing.
</Blatant Advert>

facebook

facebook like

facebook buttons

The Banking Crisis: Portents of Historical Doom

Sam Michel — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:28:32 +0000

miscellany

The Vickers report on the future of the UK's banks has been published to the predictable wailing from the banks, and gnashing of teeth from politicians.

Whether the rapacious tendencies of testosterone-fuelled traders (men and women included, I suspect) can be tempered by ring-fencing our carefully-hoarded savings remains to be seen. In my head it's a white-picket fence, 6" high, with a 3 tonne bull charging towards it, but maybe I need a) more sleep b) less caffeine.

Listening to one of my favourite podcasts, The Bugle, the usual bullshit-fuelled antics were interrupted by a series of quotes from Andy Zaltzman, one of the hosts. They seemed timely and prescient, ironic, then that they're several hundred, or in one case, thousands of years old:

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies."
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)

"Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good."
John Adams (1735-1826)

"The budget should be balanced,
the Treasury should be refilled,
public debt should be reduced,
the arrogance of officialdom
should be tempered and controlled,
and the assistance to foreign lands
should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.
People must again learn to work,
instead of living on public assistance."
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

I guess we'll live and learn. Or judging by those quotes, not so much.

Photo (cc) S. MiRK.

vickers report

banks

banking

bank reform

Adding Social Interaction Analytics to Drupal's Google Analytics Module

Sam Michel — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:43:32 +0000

drupal

geekery

If, like me, you read the recent announcement that Google Analytics just added social tracking to their tool, you'll probably be thinking, "Nice, I'd like to get me some of that social media analytics".

If you've checked the new fancy-schmancy version of the tool - look for the red New Version link in the top right-hand corner of the interface - it's likely you'll head straight for the Social section. Unless you're getting lots of Google +1's on your content, most of your traffic will be listed as Not Socially Engaged.

It's a little disheartening, and probably not entirely true. The reason? You need some custom code in order to track Twitter and Facebook interactions. Fortunately, there's documentation to help with this.

If you're in a rush, I've glued together the bits of Javascript you'll need to track Twitter and Facebook interactions:

function trackFacebook() {
  try {
    if (FB && FB.Event && FB.Event.subscribe) {
      FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(targetUrl) {
        _gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'facebook', 'like', targetUrl]);
      });
      FB.Event.subscribe('edge.remove', function(targetUrl) {
        _gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'facebook', 'unlike', targetUrl]);
      });
      FB.Event.subscribe('message.send', function(targetUrl) {
        _gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'facebook', 'send', targetUrl]);
      });
    }
  }
  catch(e) {
  }
}
function trackTwitter() {
  try {
    if (twttr && twttr.events && twttr.events.bind) {
      twttr.events.bind('tweet', function(event) {
        if (event) {
          var targetUrl;
          if (event.target && event.target.nodeName == 'IFRAME') {
            targetUrl = extractParamFromUri(event.target.src, 'url');
          }
          _gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'twitter', 'tweet', targetUrl]);
        }
      });
    }
  }
  catch(e) {
  }
}
function extractParamFromUri(uri, paramName) {
  if (!uri) {
    return;
  }
  var uri = uri.split('#')[0];  // Remove anchor.
  var parts = uri.split('?');  // Check for query params.
  if (parts.length == 1) {
    return;
  }
  var query = decodeURI(parts[1]);

  // Find url param.
  paramName += '=';
  var params = query.split('&');
  for (var i = 0, param; param = params[i]; ++i) {
    if (param.indexOf(paramName) === 0) {
      return unescape(param.split('=')[1]);
    }
  }
}
trackFacebook();
trackTwitter();

These should work for any site using Google Analytics - you'll just need to pop the code in between the code that calls the Google Analytics tracker. So in a standard implementation, it'd look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'XXXXXX']);

  // STICK YOUR SOCIAL TRACKING CODE IN HERE

  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src =
      ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www')
      + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

If you're running a Drupal site and have the rather nifty Google Analytics module installed, it's even easier to install the code (we're running Drupal 6, but instructions should be very similar for other versions).

Login as an admin and navigate to admin > settings > googleanalytics and scroll down the page and expand the Advanced settings list, then do the same for the label Custom Javascript code.

Then copy/paste the social tracking code above (or grab from this plain text version) and insert into the field labelled, Code snippet (before). Click Save. You're done. Grab a coffee, you deserve it.

N.B. This was put together very quickly with minimal testing, so make sure you test thoroughly. Any tips, problems, etc, feel free to leave a comment. This code has minimal error checking, if Twitter or Facebook's Javascript isn't present in the page, it should behave, but no guarantees. Use at your own risk.

Photo (cc) Celeste.

drupal

twitter

google analytics

facebook

google

social tracking

social engagement

Attachment	Size
ga-social-tracking.txt	1.4 KB

China: Why the West Doesn't Understand [video]

Sam Michel — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:02:31 +0000

marketing

miscellany

Each morning I try and blot out the involuntary sauna of the Central Line by feeding my addiction to TED lectures. I love the brilliant speakers and the massive variation in topics. Keeps the old noggin' ticking over.

Amongst the recent videos I watched is a talk from the TED Salon in London by economist Martin Jacques. He covers one of my pet topics: China. Ever since I've been involved in running the Digital Missions at Chinwag, we've been looking at the best way for UK firms to build relationships and business in China.

Examples are very thin on the ground - seriously, I'm still looking for any IP-based business that's actually propsering in China - but there's no doubt that China will become the new economic super-power. To prosper, any country's exporters is going to have to wrap their head around doing business with China.

This video gives some insight into why a complete shift of mindsight is needed, and more importantly, why Westerners need to stop interpreting developments in China with Western analogies.

From the synopsis:

Speaking at a TED Salon in London, economist Martin Jacques asks: How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise? The author of "When China Rules the World," he examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy, and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will become.

Photo (cc) Sam Michel.

ted

digital mission

china

martin jacques

Relax With a Delicious Beverage

Sam Michel — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:37:31 +0000

Nothing better after a long flight than relaxing with a delicious cold drink.

Posted from Posterous via email from Sam Michel