We’ve moved!

As I have now moved to become a Director at Manifest Communications London – so have my blog posts. So check out:

ManifestLondon.co.uk/Blog

For your fill of web/social media/PR/design news and opinion.

See you there!

World map of social networks

Check out this cool interactive map of the world – highlighting the dominant social network in each country. It would be much more useful if it had a ‘leaderboard’ of networks for each country and membership numbers etc, but surely that’s a matter of time (in fact, clicking through to the data set shows it really is embarrassingly top-line – but the possibility for doing all of the above appears to be there).

Unsurprisingly the map is dominated by Facebook, but it’s interesting to see where other networks have a stronghold.

WordPress.com’s inability to embed anything except a straight image and/or a YouTube clip means I can’t embed the interactive map (gah!) but you can access the full map from here. ‘Many Eyes’ is something I’m going to check out in a bit more detail too…

^ Click on the map thumbnail to open the interactive page.

Why Innocent ‘selling out’ to Coca-Cola is a good thing

So news broke in the national press this morning of Innocent Drinks selling a £30m stake in its ethical smoothie business – a category it has pioneered in the UK – to global giant Coca-Cola. The criticism of the decision has been pretty widespread and generally focuses on how this is a brand that has trumpeted its green and ethical credentials selling out to the evil Goliath.

“Surely this is the end of feeling good about Innocent Drinks?” I hear you cry. Well, not quite. As with all things linked to ethics and sustainability, the ‘old school’ green agenda often shrouds positive news (not to mention factual accuracy) in an air of disdain. As we know, for many old school greenies, Coca-Cola represents everything that is wrong with the soft-drinks industry… Sugar! Packaging! Adverts aimed at Kids! Chemicals! Big brand bully! But that’s not really the whole picture.

Now, that criticism of Coca-Cola is all well and good – but in reality it is far from the be-all and end-all of the debate about purchasing a stake in Innocent drinks. It’s about time people learned that the big businesses are not going to go away. In general, they make money (enough to pay £30m stakes in smaller businesses, even) and in general, they have made mistakes in the past – but if they’re not going to disappear just because we don’t like them, then the next best thing we can hope for is that they at least do things better.

Unless Coca-Cola is completely stupid, it is not investing in Innocent Drinks in order to undermine what this very successful business has achieved by pouring sugar into its drinks and making them use non-recylcable plastics in their packaging. Looking at criticisms faced by Coca-Cola in recent years, the reality is likely to be much the opposite. Is it impossible to0 believe they are buying Innocent Drinks to learn from them? To invest in the development of a category that is clearly beneficial to our health and a way of working that is beneficial to our environment? I mean, as Innocent themselves have explained on their website, £30m gives Coca-Cola a minority share in the business. Influence, yes. Control? No.

Similar criticisms were levelled at Innocent when they agreed to trial their drinks in McDonalds outlets. ‘Sell out’ cried the greenies in their hemp pyjamas. ‘Thank God,’ cried the thousands of real mothers who need to succumb to their children’s cries for a McDonalds on fretful shopping trips just to keep their own sanity. ‘At least now I can give them something that’s good for them,’ you could hear them sigh.

Giving Innocent the McDonald’s factor for kids was only ever going to help improve their diets. It wasn’t going to change what went into Innocent Drinks, or how they run their business.

Let’s not forget that Innocent is a business, too. Its primary goal is to make money – even if its business strategy is shaped through ethical and sustainable philosophy of its founders. It will make money from the Coca-Cola deal and benefit from the scope and scale the organisation can bring them. More children will be exposed to an Innocent smoothie sat next to the bottles of Cardiac-arrestade in their local shop. Coca-Cola might even learn to improve it’s energy efficieny and reduce its packaging waste.

Coca-Cola may not have such an ethical history, but buying into Innocent won’t necessarily bring both brands down to the lowest common denominator. Those who really care for the environment judge environmental perforance by effect, not by ego, and the impact of this business deal on both brands’ products will highlight whether it has been a good decision or not, both ethically and commercially. So get over it people – let’s just hope Coca-Cola uses this opportunity to improve and Innocent gets to work on improving things from the inside. I might be a blind optimist, but better that’s got to be better than a blind egotist, hasn’t it?

Twitter to introduce contextual advertising?

So, today I noticed that a new box has appeared on my Twitter account, neatly tucked underneath my friends/follwers numbers. Although at the moment it’s a pretty benign ‘Twictionary’ entry – it’s quite clearly a first step towards monetizing Twitter through display advertising.

Although currently masquerading as a tidy little tool to learn more about Twitter services (from searches to widgets) it is blindingly obvious that this hyperlink-enabled little box represents the future of Twitter. A future where perhaps it might actually make some money.

Wadja recently introduced contextual advertising to SMS messages through its message ads, and you would imagine that adverts that relate to your last tweet (in the model of Google Ads) could result in a pretty high clickrate. One to keep an eye on methinks.

Comic Relief goes social

I’ve only just seen the red nose day viral from Fallon and it’s pretty cool. My favourite twitter mascot Alexandr Orlov makes an appearance on video conference from Moscow.

Alongside the rest of the widgets and apps developed through the hackathon and beyond, this is one of the best non-profit social media campaigns we’ve seen (and it’s not even finished yet)

Kaizo will be blogging on the campaign in full tomorrow so keep your eyes peeled…

The 5 best presentation tools on the web

The time has come to rise up against the tyranny of Powerpoint; to say goodbye to 15MB .ppt files that you can’t email to anyone. The time has come for presentations to become dynamic, vivid and exciting. ‘Slides’ were invented for slide projectors – long since left to rot in highschool store rooms and hardly representative of 21st century communications.

So, banishing the ‘overhead projector’ philosophy and the need to share presentations on FTP because they’re too big to email, here are 5 of the neatest web tools to help you to make a bigger impact with your presentations:

1. Prezi

Okay, so I’ve mentioned this one before. But Prezi is the best example I’ve seen of trying to do something different with presentations. It takes a creative mind to  unleash the potential of Prezi, and in its current Beta test format (which means it’s free, people) it is a little limited in terms of fonts etc – but Prezi can make even the most boring topic alarmingly exciting.

Presentations can be downloaded as an .exe file without the need to download any software so it’s simple to use and save in your archive.  However, because the system doesn’t use slides and you can’t copy and paste presentation elements from one to the other it does mean you’re building shows from scratch every time.

2.SlideRocket

SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It takes what Powerpoint can do and, well, does it better. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more. Best bits include cool slide transitions and the fact that hosted presentations can be accessed by everyone without the need to send a huge file.

Unlike Prezi, SlideRocket does have an amazing asset saving system, keeping all your pics, charts and multimedia in one place so making a new presentation is quicker and simpler than Powerpoint. You can even import Powerpoint slides if you want to update an existing presentation. Simples.

3. Animoto

I’ve banged on about Animoto enough here. It is seriously amazing though. Quick, easy, not free if you want the full service in terms of downloads etc, but not expensive either. Essentially, it lets you create amazing animated slideshows of image files (interspersed with captions if you wish) quickly and easily without any technical skill required – trust me.

From a PR perspective, presenting cuttings in an Aminoto presentation can reallly bring them to life. Good for design pitches too. Above is an example of an animation I created on Animoto to embed in a Prezi presentation at Going Social.

4. Slideshare

Okay – Slideshare is less an alternative to Powerpoint, and more a way to extend its uses. Slideshare is probably the most well-known presentation tool online, and rather than helping you create presentations or content, it’s a way to help your presentation go viral.

At Kaizo we use it to promote the Kaizo Advocacy Index every year and it really drives awareness – as well as providing an element of multimedia to provide journalists in our Digital News Release:

5. Empressr

Empressr essentially blends some of the benefits of SlideRocket with some of the benefits of Slideshare. Although at first glance it seems to be a poor man’s version of both, the best element is that, unlike Slideshare, it supports animated transitions within embedded presentations – making Empressr embeds less flat and lifeless than Slideshare.

I’ve not used this tool a great deal yet but will update this post when I have. It won’t let me embed an existing presentation because I’m on the free version of WordPress but it does seem to be more shareable on social networks such as Facebook than Slideshare. the animations seem pretty smooth but load times are much higher than Slideshare too.

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So, there you have it. By no means are any of these tools ‘hidden gems’. They’re just the best out there in my honest opinion – but please let me know if you disagree.

Nothing is as stressful as moving…

So – having decided that I’m going to stick with this blogging malarky, I’ve moved my blog from Blogger (which was frustrating me in terms of themes and structure) to WordPress (which has a whole host of new things to annoy me).

Yes, it looks a lot nicer, but unfortunately I can’t embed half the things I could in Blogger – well not without an installation process that I can’t complete as I use a laptop from work most of the time. Peaks and troughs I guess.

Anyway – I’ll be posting a lot more stuff in the coming weeks so keep your eyes peeled. Might even get the Flip out and start videoblogging. Please subscribe to the RSS, or just come back and have a goosey on a regular basis.

Wherever I go, trouble follows…

Check out this fancy mosaic of all my Twitter followers:

It’s easy to create your own here. I’m sure I’m not the first one to blog this, but I’m sure some of you out there will find it useful.

Also – you might find some useful contacts in here. Most of them are in the PR/journalism game but if that’s your bag, get following.

Portrait of a Twitter user

The latest study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project says that 11% of all adults use Twitter. Well, 11% of all adults in America use Twitter. Well, they use Twitter or update their status online (using Tumblr, Friendfeed or somesuch).

The study offers some great insights but I presume UK stats would be much different in terms of traffic. For instance, Twitter use has increased only 2% since November last year (which the report seems to think is a big growth) but I’m betting UK Twitter growth is much bigger over the same period.

Anyway, the real insight for me was the picture it paints of the average Twitter user – something I think (though happy to hear arguments to the contrary) that won’t be so influenced by the geographic divide. Some of the key stats include:

• The median age of a Twitter user is 31. Facebook is 26 and MySpace 27, apparently. LinkedIn makes me feel less ‘past it’, rocking in with a median age of 40.

• Tweeters are city folk – only 9% are from rural areas, whereas a mighty 35% are from urban areas (the same demographic accounts for 29% of all internet users in the US, so it’s a clear trend).

• Unsurprisingly, Twitter users are more likley to use their mobile to access t’internet – a full 40% of them surf via mobile, compared to a lowly 24% of web users that don’t use Twitter.

• 57% of Tweeters read blogs, while 29% have their own.

So there you go. Tweeters don’t look like geeks at all. Honest. Now all that’s left is for someone to do this sort of study in the UK. Or maybe one exists and I just don’t know about it. Feel free to leave comments with links to other useful/interesting/geeky social media demographic studies.

Who do you think you’re kidding Mr Twitter?

Hitler does NOT like it when Twitter goes down.

I’m in San Francisco at the moment at the global HQ of Flip Video – so will post some more relevant missives soon.