Over the past year or so, I’ve been working – on and off – to gather interest in the idea of encouraging school pupils to explore open data, data visualisation, and the political lessons that can be drawn from this. I won’t go into too much detail about his now as I’ve covered it extensively [...]
Posts under ‘Online engagement’
Being a ‘firehose predator’ – looking for changes
A few weeks ago, I posted here on ‘drinking from the firehose‘, looking at what we can learn from the huge tide of commentary that social media is creating for the first time. For me, the most interesting aspect of this is that it gives journalists, PRs, or even more sophisticated intelligence gatherers, the chance [...]
Things people in PR & Campaigns need to know: No1: Be ‘Machine Readable’
Do you have a scanner in your office? If you do, and you look at the disks that came with it, you’ll probably find that it has an OCR function that you can use. OCR – Optical Character Recognition - can take old-media (in this case, print) and turn it into digital media. I can scan that [...]
The Twitter ‘Firehose’: Going beyond the tip-of-the-iceberg.
I’ll be posting up a bit more about social media analytics over the coming weeks and months, but today’s news – ‘Hedge fund uses Twitter sentiment analysis to guide decisions’ - provides a useful opportunity to provide a timely taster. For example, can we use this kind of approach to improve campaigning, media-monitoring, governance or public health? [...]
Socialising your organisation’s information; could this be easier?
A few of the organisations that I work with have raised very similar queries with me recently. In each case, they’re public or voluntary sector bodies who don’t really have issues around proprietary information. They believe that most of the information that they have should be made as widely available as possible. Reading this article [...]
Trades Unions using Twitter
Shorter version of this post Twitter is a powerful tool. Increasingly, people who work in campaigns and communications believe this is probably true. They beleive it because thought-leaders in communications and marketing say it’s a powerful tool – and are known to use it very well. (See [social proof]) What they don’t always know is [...]
Updating websites every day (without too much work)
Got a website? Feeling guilty because you’ve not fed it lately? While it’s probably not the end of the world, unchanged websites soon slip down search-engine rankings. The digital version of tumbleweed doesn’t look good at the best of times. Perhaps, worst of all, if your reason for neglecting it is that you’re too busy, [...]
Are voters clever enough to vote?
I’ve written a post over on The Local Democracy Blog offering a quick survey of the debate around voters’ capacity to vote wisely (or not). It asks what ‘wisely’ means and then points to a few articles and books that go some way to answering these questions. I mention it here because I cover issues [...]
Leadership blogging tips 5: Downgrade the in-box
Bloggers often teach themselves to ignore their email inbox. In writing the occasional blog-post / tweet / Facebook status update, we learn to choose what message we want to put out today – and the value of grabbing people’s attention with a short classy bit of profundity. And we start to lose patience with others [...]
Can you relax while the Internet chatters about you?
Writing online conversations off (“twittle twattle” – John Prescott) is becoming less of an option. Among the trolls and loons lurk careful pedants. The successful journalist is increasingly defined by their ability to cultivate and harvest the work of such nit-pickers who will find the flaws in your arguments. Such rigorous discussion (notwithstanding the shouty [...]
