Another new team member! 11/16/2009
 Double Shot co-founder Sarah Turner will be working with us 2 days a week from November. The rest of the time she will continue as a digital media specialist with UK Trade and Investment (UKTI). Sarah's areas of expertise include R&D, technology collaboration, business development and consulting. In her own words, "My UKTI clients are some of the biggest names globally in media and entertainment. I help their technologists and researchers address current and future challenges by helping them collaborate with the best UK innovators from both industry and academia. I plan to bring some of this emerging technology, from large and small companies, as well as international knowledge to Double Shot." Sarah We’ve just finished a series of three social media training or awareness-raising sessions for the good people at BBC Scotland, in the wonderful studios on Pacific Quay. These sessions were to some extent a remix of the sessions we did in London during the winter and spring earlier this year (which we blogged) but of course, times move on so there a whole load of new stuff in there too. So we’re going to put our notes and resources up here both as follow up to the attendees and as – just possibly – a useful bit of “stuff” for the casual reader (with the obvious caveat that this is NOT an essay, but the basis of presentations punctuated with some great Q&A interventions from some brilliant guests, about who more later)… First up then: Social Media for broadcasters: an introduction So what is Social Media? Well, let’s kick off with our old favourite, Mitchell & Webb’s “Reckon” sketch: Sound familiar?! Actually, here’s how Wikipedia defines it: “Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).” Mmm… ok… So what's that mean, and what sort of impact is it having in the UK? Let’s looks at some stats, which are never that easy to come by; we’re grateful to socialmediastatistics for these Facebook stats alone: “8.4 million UK users of which…
Double Shot’s Principles of Social media 1. Building Trust & enhanced reputation or Reliable voices Amazon’s featured user reviews are more "trusted" than "official" reviews; look at this review of shredders and note the review of the reviews: “50 of 50 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Good quality shredder for a good price!, 11 Jan 2008 By Mrs. J. E. Parkinson (UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) It's not often I find the time to reveiw a product and I have certainly bought a lot from Amazon and am always impressed by their service. After having several of the everyday cross cut shredders which are too small and unbelievably cumbersome and messy to empty, this one is a dream come true! I work from home so I have a lot to shred! This one has a drawer, with a little window to view how full it's getting, so you only need to pull it out and empty. Very little mess involved and a much larger capacity than the everyday ones you can buy everywhere. Takes up to 10 sheets of 80 gsm paper and even has a credit card slot! I paid £66.93, which included postage, from an Amazon Market Trader called 'The Warehouse.Com. I ordered it Sunday evening and it arrived Tuesday morning! Unbelievable service!” Or look at Twitter’s announcement of change of terms from only last week: "Hi, We'd like to let you know about our new Terms of Service. As Twitter has evolved, we've gained a better understanding of how folks use the service. As a result, we've updated the Terms and we're notifying account holders. We've posted a brief overview on our company blog and you can read the Terms of Service online. If you haven't been by in a while, we invite you to visit Twitter to see what else is new. Overview: http://blog.twitter.com Terms: http://www.twitter.com/tos Twitter: http://www.twitter.com These updates complement the spirit of Twitter. If the nature of our service changes, we'll revisit the Terms as necessary. Comments are welcome, please find the "feedback" link on the Terms of Service page. Thanks, Biz Stone, Co-founder, Twitter Inc” Or take a look at their blog: Now compare that with, say, your bank’s small print changes…. 2. Empowerment A great recent one. John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, wrote an op-ed piece in the WSJ attacking Obama’s healthcare reforms. The blogosphere blew up in response, and a Facebook campaign was under way swiftly. All sorts of claims then started to surface about WF: Then there’s the classic: the HSBC/Facebook/student loan story: It’s global, too; we’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of our work with Save the Children. Here’s the highly successful AVAAZ campaigning site. Anyway, this leads us on to the next of our prinicples or themes: 3. People making the news Perhaps the moment when Twitter started to make its way into the mainstream consciousness: the Mumbai terror attacks. Here’s Forbes on the story. London’s 7th July attack three years previously saw arguably the first real embracing of user-generated content (UGC) by the media, with the BBC in particular using the public’s photos. Just don’t think about this as a new kind of journalism, though, as this excellent World Service piece makes clear. 4. Discovery vs Advertising or Your data matter or unintentional crowdsourcing… Here’s Simon’s user page on the music recommendations service Last.fm: Last is important here because it makes recommendations based on the actual listening habits of its 30 million+ users; it tracks these through its “Audioscrobbler” plug-in. This can even be triggered via other players/apps, even competitors, for instance Spotify. Why is this important? Because Last can make uncanny recommendations … all based on the unwitting actions of the rest of the “crowd”. It’s really the same principle as with Amazon (yes, them again): We’re no longer in the realm of “top down” marketing, rather in a world of more and more powerful maths and stats! The algorithm is the new marketer! (More on this in our session on marketing… ) 5. There’s no hiding or You can run but you can’t hide So, we’ve talked about Twitter and Facebook, and we take it for granted that people are more and more keen to live their life in public… but not always. Here’s that Japanese finance minister drunk at a press conference: And that Sarah Palin prank call: The point here is that in the past, one would most likely have got way with it… the prank call would have disappeared into the aether, the press conference would have been forgotten. Not any more! The web sticks! Even for journalists: Journalisted tracks what journalists have been writing about and it can be very revealing… This is important when thinking about our next point… 6. Authenticity Here’s the Walmarting Across America story. Remember, the lesson here isn’t that if you’re going to embark on a ruse you have to be careful – it’s that you shouldn’t “go there” in the first place. There are too many people out there: someone is going to rumble you! If you’re not authentic with this stuff, it can go horribly wrong. The Guardian have recently written about the phenomenon of "Glove puppets and Astro Turfing". Uh oh, it’s back to John Mackey of Whole Foods. 7. Connectedness Well, yes, of course this is about connectedness, really by definition. But we must stress how social media isn’t simply about a culture of narcissism - “me-casting”, if you will – it’s about real communities of interest. Mumsnet is a great example of this: Or look at this 7/7 bombings community on the photo-sharing site flickr. It’s somehow extraordinarily moving; it would take a considerable degree of cynicism to see this as simply narcissism at work. 8. Losing Control This point has huge implications for an organisation that associates quality with control, like the BBC. But it’s an essential characteristic of social media, that the very moment you put something out in the world anything can happen. Of course this is also what is so good and powerful about this new kind of engagement. It allows others to naturally work with you, sometimes for you… and allows what you do to become part of someone else’s conversation. It is, in fact, the letting go that drives the famous viral effect. Take a look at this (not untypical) thread on the BBC radio 3 message board. What’s interesting is that although the thread starts off with a damning line about the station, other listeners quickly jump in to the fray to take issue with the criticism. So while you can’t control the conversation, you should have faith in your audience/users/customers. We then had a two-way conversation and audience Q&A with: Mark Pendleton, whose Radio Lingua language learning service makes heavy and brilliant use of social media. And Graham Gillies, the Interactive Producer at BBC Scotland responsible for BBC One’s Cycling the Americas website, featuring about as much Web 2 and social media action as any BBC website ever! And then… The problematic Twitter default or Choosing the right tools for the job … in which SH/JS look at some useful groups of tools: Community tools Right, we don’t think you need to know about: mySpace But one thing to note about them… Facebook succeeded because it was much more usable. But… MySpace is possibly making a resurgence because it’s found a USP: music. Off the shelf web build Weebly Square Space Blogging Typepad Research and listening Twitterfall Google reader Twoogle Video and audio YouTube Vimeo Soundcloud Outbound aggregators Tweetdeck We finished up by asking the attendees to come up with a social media proposition based on a fictional/notional BBC show or brand. These are some of the questions we asked them to consider, which you my find useful: • Which specific products - tools, applications and services - will you need to make this project work? • Do you need a 3rd party tool or is there a BBC one that will do the job? • Can you find existing instances on the web of these tools at work, delivering outcomes comparable to your own? • What do you need to do to set these tools up, make them work and maintain them? • What type of community hosting will the idea need? And how much effort will it need? • Have you got a contingency "scaling up" plan for if your project really takes off? • Do you have a community "exit strategy" for the end of the project? Simon A new face at Double Shot 09/24/2009
 As mentioned in our news, we're delighted to announce that our old friend Matthew Shorter will be joining us as our fourth director from the beginning of 2010. Matthew is currently the Interactive Editor, Music for the BBC's Audio & Music department, where he is putting into place a series of ground-breaking data-driven music information and discovery services as well as overseeing websites for events such as Glastonbury and The Electric Proms and various other BBC music strands like Introducing and Later. Justin and I both worked with Matthew while at the BBC, and always knew he was someone we'd love to have on the DS team. He's smart, erudite and incisive and a fine pianist and composer to boot. He's also been a fine manager over the years and we're sure he'll be sorely missed. For a bit more sense of the man, you might care to read this recent interview with Matthew in the The Guardian or, more properly revealing, his Last.fm profile. Simon A real loss to us all 09/10/2009
We were shocked and very saddened to hear this week about the death of Penny Vernham. Penny was a key contact for us at the BBC, helping us organise the various workshops and training sessions we've been doing for the corporation's Training & Development department over the course of the last ten months or so. Despite our no doubt ludicrous demands and requests, Penny not only always came up with the goods, she did so with genuine good humour. It's not often that one gets to work with someone who's totally on it and fun to be with too. Penny was one of those rare people. We'll genuinely miss working with her very much. Our condolences to her family, and to her colleagues, especially Andy Wilson, her boss, who we're sure will be missing her very sorely. Justin & Simon BBC Workshop, March 2nd 03/02/2009
Phew! Another week, another BBC workshop. Today we hosted the first of two "Capturing Conversations" workshops (the second is coming up this Friday - March 6th), looking at the ways online "conversations" can be incorporated into radio broadcast in particular.     Latest BBC workshop 02/22/2009
On February 20th we hosted the second installment of the Right Tool for the Right Job workshop - part of our ongoing social media work for the BBC's Training & Development team. Here are a few snaps we took during the afternoon.       BBC Workshop, December 16th 01/03/2009
On December 16th We delivered the second in our series of social media workshops for the BBC at the organisation's Marylebone High Street offices: Putting the Social into Social Media. The second half of the session consisted of a panel discussion again chaired by Jem. The Word's David Hepworth, Radio 1's Hugh Garry and Panorama's Derren Lawford gave a diverse yet remarkably consensual set of views on the use of social media in a broadcasting and publishing context.     We announced a while back that we were pleased to be working with BBC Training & Development on delivering a series of workshops about social media and its relevance to BBC production staff. So... yesterday we kicked the series off with a little 3 hour session entitled "Right Tools for the Right Job".     What's love got to do with it? 12/01/2008
We've been lucky to do work over the Summer and Autumn with the Royal Opera House, amongst which we've been taking a look at some of the applications of gaming tech to music education. Here's Justin showing some of their Learning and Interactive teams how to use Guitar Hero and Singstar. The Tina Turner karaoke rocked.     Double Shot - related launches 12/01/2008
Two pieces of news about website launches in which we've had a hand. Today sees the official launch of the City of London's Visit the City site, a comprehensive guide for visitors to the oldest part of London - the Square Mile. We've been working closely with the City in delivering this site, not least engaging them in a thorough User-Centred Design approach to re-designing the homepage and several key areas. | ArchivesFebruary 2010 Blogs we learn from CategoriesAll |
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