photo credit: Sebastian Mary

Third Thursday is upon us again, and as you may know, it’s time for the Manx Social Media Club to meet up for lunch. It’s an open event which can be attended by anyone with an interest in Social Media. It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned professional, or whether you’re just starting to get to grips with the medium, this is an opportunity to come and share ideas, learn new things and meet your online friends in a real-life context.

So come and join us for a spot of lunch. We meet at Paparazzi in Douglas from 12:30 till 14:00 but feel free to just drop in for a coffee if you can’t make it for the entire lunch. That’s this Thursday 20th October at 12:30. Looking forward to seeing you all!

P.S. Check out the awesome post by @pdms rallying support for the Social media Club: click here

It’s the first time I’ve use SlideRocket and I’m pretty impressed at it’s presentation capabilities. I particularly love the Flickr integration which enabled me to add some great imagery to the presentation. I guess the only trepidation I had was that it’s a cloud-based solution, which meant that if my Internet connection died I would have been in trouble, but increasingly that’s starting to feel like a smaller and smaller risk.

Happy to accept any feedback on the material in the presentation or the presentation itself.

Here are the slides from the talk. You might find them interesting:

So, who were my picks this week. Well, as always, it was a pretty hard choice and I had to omit a number of people, but there was no way I could get everyone I wanted in. So I picked some of the tweets I enjoyed most this week, and my #ffs were the relevant tweeters. These were:

• @alyssa_milano
• @amadeus_iom
• @chrisbrogan
• @harbourcreek
• @masticatingmanx
• @mbageekdotcom
• @philgatt
• @problogger
• @scobleizer
• @sherrilynne
• @swoopiom
• @techburgh

Check them out, and if you like their tweets, make sure your follow them!

All you need to do is to start up Waze on your smart phone and let it track your location. It figures out your speed from your GPS updates and lets people on the same route know when you’re approaching slow moving traffic. You also earn points by helping them map different points and roads.

Sounds interesting? If so, check out the guided tour, and if you have a smartphone, download the app

Companies that embrace social media give employees the tools they need to collaborate, communicate and innovate across organisational lines, geographic locations and time zones. There are plenty of benefits:

• more productivity
• better collaboration and communication
• innovation boost
• decreased IT costs
• easier knowledge management
• improved product development cycles
• increased profits
• improved efficiencies

Our speaker is Chris Gledhill, managing director of PDMS, the Isle of Man’s largest software developer. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, PDMS has experience in helping organisations implement intranets and portals to aid internal collaboration using SharePoint and other technologies. He will present a case study based on PDMS’s own experiences of using social media and internal collaboration technologies to share information, exchange ideas and improve communication.

In addition, yours truly, Sherrilynne Starkie will give a brief overview on using other social platforms like chat, wikis, blogs, podcasts, and Facebook to fuel internal communications excellence.

The Social Media Club has chapters in more than 170 cities around the world and brings together journalists, publishers, communications professionals, artists, amateur media creators, citizen journalists, teachers, students, tool makers, and other interested collaborators, basically anyone using or impacted by the social internet. Our motto is ‘if you get it; share it’ and our mission is to advance media literacy, promote industry standards, encourage ethical behaviour and share the lessons learned.

It all happens on 24 June, 2010 at 12.30 at The Hilton in Douglas. A finger buffet will be served. Super Third Thursday is sponsored by PDMS and so it’s free to attend, but space is limited so book early by email smc(a)sherrilynnestarkie.com

I guess I could throw a party, invite friends round for a BBQ and dance around the fire, but what does it all mean? Well, not much really! I’m an avid user of Twitter, so I’m bound to have good stats, but is my Twitter account really all that valuable? Well, it depends on the context in which you’re looking at it. I tend to tweet about interesting thing related to business and technology, so if you’re operating in that space, sure. But if you’re a sports fan, my Twitter account probably has less value than a constipated pigeon. If you’re interested in wildlife conservation, car restoration, fishing, or one of a million varied subjects my Twitter account would be useless to you because you won’t find a single tweet about them.

There are also a number of reasons why the figures used to come up with the grading are arbitrary and easily gamed, but that’s the subject for another discussion. In the meantime, enjoy the champagne!

• Blog Links
• Social Media and Bookmarking
• Press Releases
• Directory Submissions
• Local Search
• Select Authority Link Leasing

This list comes from an SEO company called Globe Runner who can help with link building services should you need them. But if you read up about the techniques used, it’s not really rocket science.

What techniques do YOU use for link building?

It’s interesting to see the Isle of Man “come online” with the latest wave of location based social networks. The two main networks at the moment have to be FourSquare and Gowalla, and while Gowalla hasn’t made much of an impact here, I’m seeing more and more people try out FourSquare.

If you’ve never come across it, FourSquare is a social network based around people reporting where they are and what they are doing. The social part of it comes from the fact that friends, family and colleagues can all subscribe to updates and let each other know where they are. Here’s how the company defines their service:

foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. We aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.

The other side of FourSquare is the business angle where businesses can find out more from and about the people who come and visit. There only seems to be one place in the Isle of Man that has taken this up, Bride Tea Rooms who are offering Free Coffee for the Major and every 8th check-in. It’s really, really great to see a Manx business taking such a proactive stance towards technology and customer interaction. I hope it’s a route other companies decide to go down.

By the way, I’m OwenC on FourSquare

I came across an excellent article today called Social Media Safety: Acceptable Use Policies Critical. It outlines five different questions that need to be considered when putting together an Acceptable Use Policy. Here’s what needs to be considered:

1. Access Levels: Do all employees need the same level of access? We came up with a 3-tier system we’re currently working on implementing.
   • Restricted: Some employees do not really need access to Social Media. Internet use is not core to their function, so any change to what they have can be disruptive. Not everyone has a desktop assigned to them, particularly staff not working in an office environment.
   • Limited Access: Most employees require some sort of Social Media access, but aren’t really authorised to engage with the public in a professional capacity. The fundamental shift is in this group, as corporate policy previously blocked Social Media for this group, while I believe that access should be provided, whether it’s for learning, monitoring or any other reason; but we still have a way to go.
   • Full Access: PR and Marketing functions within Departments need access to Social Media platforms. This is their bread and butter and they should be listening, engaging and interacting with the public on these channels as well as traditional ones. This is where we’re doing most of our work at the moment.
2. Downloads: Do employees need to download specialise software? The desktop team have enough trouble packaging up all the applications different users need. Specialised applications need to be avoided as much as possible. Luckily most services are becoming more and more cloud-based, which means standard Web controls can cover most of the requirements. It does mean we’re more likely to go down the HootSuite route as opposed to the TweetDeck on.
3. When, Where and How Much? Regardless of policy, employees will use Social Media platforms during work hours (and I’m confident also use them for work reasons doing personal time). How does an Acceptable Use Policy square this up. How much automation and how much policy is used to control and manage these behaviours is up to Human Resources, but I believe that employee training and trust is fundamental to coming up with the right balance
4. Defining the engagement: This one is a doozy for a civil servant. Microblogging is rife with people giving away snippets of information that can be misinterpreted or construed as official positions. So far, the people with access are PR professionals so we fully expect them to be aware of what they are signing up for. However, if we are to extend the reach of social media, what and how things can be said needs to be looked at. This is indeed a challenge, but I think getting this right is the key to success. Personally, I don’t think it’s that hard, people speak about their job and career down at the pub to friends and family. The same rules apply online. You wouldn’t post things you don’t want your mum, your wife or your boss to know online, in the same way you wouldn’t talk about them in the pub.
5. Dealing with policy violations: An acceptable use policy would also need to define how policy violations are dealt with. We’re working with existing policies at the moment, so any Social Media policy needs to work together with these to make coherent sense. There’s nothing worse that two policies that conflict with each other.

It’s an interesting journey and I’m proud to be a part of it. I know we have a long way to go, but a number of initiatives have already started taking shape, which I’ll be blogging about in due course. In the meantime, we have loads to learn together, and formulating a cohesive policy that works hand-in-hand with the current Acceptable Use Policy is just one of the fun things we need to do.