RMM

Last week I got a nice email asking if I would be interested in giving an interview to wordsmith website Essential Writers about my former/kind-of-current life as a journalist.

Of course, it’s always nice to be asked to do that kind of stuff, but when I heard that former interviewees included legendary screenwriter Anthony Horrowitz and comedian Dave Gorman I was even more glad I begged them to interview me  did it.

You can read the the full interview here.

I got a call last week from Gascoignes Estate Agents in Surrey asking if I could dust off my social media crystal ball and gaze upon how one might use social media to buy a house in the future. So, after some chin stroking, head scratching and a nap deep pontification I penned the following few lines for their e-newsletter:

Until recently social media has not influenced the purchase of property in the way it has for other ‘big ticket’ items such as holidays or vehicles, where a friends’ holiday snaps shared on Facebook might encourage you to book a holiday to the same destination or an automotive forum might warn you off a car with high yearly running costs. However, the deep penetration of ‘smartphones’ in the UK has meant that increasingly our online social networking is done on-the-go. As a result we have greater access to hyper-local knowledge and content about where people are, what they’re doing and what they think about it. Increasingly this information will influence our property buying decisions as we are exposed to a new, deeper layer of knowledge about locales.

The question, then, is whaddaya reckon? Of all the myriad social technologies, which do YOU think already do, or will increasingly influence property buying?

Just a quick note to say you should DEFINITELY pop to your local newsagents and buy the latest edition of Esquire. Not because of the picture of Megan Fox on the front, but because if you flick to page 111 you’ll notice a wee little peice written by yours truly entitled ‘How to not be a tw@t on Twitter’.

A while back, we announced that we were working with The Daily Beast to promote their website (and the content therein). As of last week we’ve set up a Europe-specific Twitter feed called ‘EuroBeast (www.twitter.com/eurobeast) where we, on behalf of The Daily Beast, will be tweeting those stories of most relevance and interest to European audiences. If this sounds like it appeals then we’d encourage you to start following here.

For the uninitiated, The Daily Beast iss your ‘omnivorous friend’ which reads everything so you don’t have to. Instead it recommends the most interesting and important news stories of the day for your reading pleasure. Their mantra being ‘read this, skip that’.

From now on our mantra shall be ‘tweet this, skip that’! (well, maybe…!)

On Thursday 30th at 2PM at Internet World along with Kate Cooper from the Digital Training Company I’ll be revising and reprising our earlier Obama 2.0 KUDOS Lessons in Social Media talk.

And we’d love you to join us in the IW Theatre: Connectivity & Hosting to join in the session and afterwards at a nearby hostelry to continue the discussion.

The gist of the session is a look at some of the key social media activities from the ‘08 presidential campaign and understand how they were used and why they were so successful.

To enable the easy analysis and comparison of the various activities that huddle beneath the rather broad umbrella of ’social media’ we’ve developed a simple planning framework; KUDOS. In short, we look at an activity from the point of view of both the brand and the audience to see to what degree  it is Knowledgable, Useful, Desirable, Open and Sharable.

During the Internet World session we will give an overview of how KUDOS can be used to asess any type of activity, we’ll then appply it to some of Obama’s activities and then finally as a group we’ll use KUDOS score cards (yes - there will be giveaways!) to assess a specifc activity and give it a KUDOS score.

Internet World is free to attend, but you might find it useful to pre-register here. There’s a lot to see so why not make a day of it; pack a lunch and bring the interns.