Arif Latif, Donato Esposito, Anna Latif
Digital Birmingham’s ‘Digital Business’ campaign, in partnership with the Birmingham Post, was set up last year to support a business to improve its standing in the community by improving its communication channels, use social networking sites to advertise and get feedback from its customers and attract new ones.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit recently as Digital Birmingham have been looking at the way that using the social web can help Small and Medium Sized businesses to drum up work.
Recently, Pete Ashton had a problem with his boiler and he asked Twitter for recommendations.
Now, having been on various Moseley related lists in the past ten years or so I knew that it wouldn’t be long before somebody recommended Clive the Gasman. Sure enough, Jon Bounds soon popped up and did exactly that. I’ve used Clive myself because Bill Lees from the old Moseley Free group recommended him.
It has been widely reported that British singer, Lily Allen, has decided to de-activate all of her social networking profiles (Twitter, MySpace etc) because she believes she has become addicted to the phenomenon. Many press photographs of her over the last couple of years have usually shown her with a PDA of some description, updating her profiles.
However, the initial explanation for this was that Allen used MySpace to promote her music when she first started out. This is done by a lot of musicians wanting to get their singles noticed. But for Allen, and many others, it appears that their use of digital devices and social networks has taken over their lives.
So, for many of her fans, Lily Allen will not be as visible any more - but as her music is known widely and critically acclaimed, she has perhaps used these forums as much as she has needed to. It is interesting to hear about ‘celebrities’ admitting their over-use of social networks, or the internet and digital devices in general. It has brought more attention to this issue, as an individual must balance their existence in the digital and real world.
According to many recent news reports, the email will be defunct in 10 years as the growth of social networking sites and instant messaging increases ever rapidly. But is this really true? Will people actually stop using emails to communicate in their personal and professional lives?
Hello Digital is back! Birmingham’s first digital festival returns this week with its one day Business Conference - 21st October 2009 @ Millennium Point. Want your business to be more competitive in this digital world? Then you can’t miss it.
I have recently returned from the USA, after visiting New York City for a week. We, obviously, didn’t watch television much during the holiday as we were too busy visiting as many tourist attractions as possible in the 168 hours that we had. But when we caught up with the headlines via CNN (UK news channels did not seem to be available) it was interesting to notice that every anchor, newsreader and journalist displayed their Twitter usernames, while reporting the daily news, ensuring the public could follow them to find out more.
I know Twitter is huge in the UK, but it is still up and coming i.e. a lot of people who use social networks like Facebook and MySpace are yet to make the move onto Twitter. However, across the Atlantic it is definitely second nature.
A few months ago I think my first question might have been, what is a hashtag? So, for anybody still as unenlightened as I was: hashtags are a way of marking your message on Twitter so that it can then be grouped with other messages using the same tag.
That sounds really boring, doesn’t it?
But there have been a number of events that I’ve either attended, watched on telly or even not watched on telly where I’ve also followed the hashtag and found it really useful. For instance, at the recent Digital Inclusion Conference there were a significant number of delegates, and importantly, people who hadn’t been able to attend, who were using the hashtag #ndi09 to follow what was going on across the conference. This form of Live Blogging meant that a lot of interested people who couldn’t take two days away from work to attend the conference, but were very interested in the subject matter, could contribute to the discussions.
Facebook, Twitter and blogs are now more popular than email says a report which was highlighted in the Telegraph this week. This is more evidence of the current growth in usage of social media tools.
The annual fundraising event that is Comic Relief takes place on 13th March, but as is always the case, the publicity drive has started much earlier. This year you will find the Red Nose Campaign on the usual TV channels, radio and newspapers but also the social networks Twitter, Facebook and Bebo as celebrities and the public alike don their red noses to raise millions of pounds for UK and African causes.
Takeaways? Alcohol? Swearing? Many people will be 8 days in, perhaps finding giving up their vice difficult already. However, Italian priests have called on their followers to give up technology such as texting, social networking and computer games so Italy’s physical social interaction can dominate once again. Digital Birmingham’s very own Dave Harte has given up Twitter, but I don’t think the Archbishop of Modena had much to do with his decision……….
More - What have you given up for Lent?
Digital Birmingham is a Birmingham City Council initiative and part of a city wide strategic partnership of more than 30 public, private and voluntary organisations
Blog powered by WordPress
