Henry's Blog » social media

My top blogging tips – in video form!

Henry Elliss — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:29:14 +0000

I recently did a small piece-to-camera (can you still call it that when I wasn’t actually looking at the camera? Hmm) for the IAB, as part of a series of videos they are doing with various Social Media council members. I chose to talk about blogging, and if you’d like to see what I said you can view the video on the IAB social media blog. Click the image below to see it.

For some reason, the microphone they attached to me looks like a small black Lego man has committed suicide inside my shirt – I think that adds to the (limited) appeal of the video though…! It possibly distracts attention away from my double chin too…

Social media – time for a rant!

Henry Elliss — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:48:21 +0000

This is going to be short and certainly not at all sweet. First up – a caveat: The following is the opinion of this blog’s author and him alone, not the company he works for. Hence why I’m posting it on my personal blog…

I know that working in social media means I should be ‘supportive’ of my peers, working together for a brighter future and all that crap – don’t rock the boat, don’t question each other, etc etc. But two things lately are REALLY starting to get my goat – to point where it makes me want to scream. One is the view that social media is just ‘online PR’ – but I’ll save that rant for another day. The thing that is getting my goat today is social media events and conferences, and the aftermath.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to quite a few, I’ve even spoken at a couple, and generally speaking they know exactly what they are. They’re not always perfect – hell, the number of times I’ve got to an event only to find that it’s just full of other agencies, with one or two lone client-side people looking slightly scared in the corner… But generally speaking they know what’s what.

But recently, there’s been a trend for these events to turn in to TOTAL love-ins for the community – total back-slapping, group-hugging, aren’t-we-all-amazing, this-week-has-changed-my-life-ing love-athons, and it’s starting to really piss me off. I’m sure the speakers and talks going on at them are very cool – great ideas, lots of positive attitudes, etc etc. But do we really have to hear about how great they are, not just during them but for weeks on end afterwards!? It seems to be a trend that’s growing and growing, and frankly unless it stops people are going to start thinking the following about the social media ‘community’:

We’re all too busy navel-gazing to know what’s actually going on in the real world
We’re all so big-headed and arrogant that we can’t possibly be fun to work with
These micro-communities are so super-smart and clever that nobody else could possibly fit in.

I’m going to stop now before my rant becomes personal or too specific, but I’ve got one more thing to say before I do:

Unless you’ve found a cure for cancer at one of these events, can we get a bit of perspective please?

Thanks…

My 5 relatively-boring (online) aims for 2010

Henry Elliss — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:31:07 +0000

As I’ve just discovered that I can post blogs from my Blackberry, I thought I’d take this opportunity (I.e. A very dull train journey to work) to jot down some of my online aims for 2010. I know what you’re thinking – dull, Dull, DULL! I think the same every time I spot a “10 greatest blah in 2009″ list on Twitter, so I don’t blame you at all if you skip this. But I reckon that by writing it down in a public forum, I might just have a chance of sticking to some of these…

Consolidate my efforts…

Having been doing internetty stuff for over 15 years now, I’ve collected quite a few different sites, projects and profiles along the way. Just as I think it will be for the internet as a whole, I’m going to aim to consolidate and reduce the amount of different places I ‘reside’ in 2010 – or at the very least try to reduce duplication and confusion.

Just off the top of my head I can list social networks I belong to (Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, FriendFeed, Yammer, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Google and Plaxo), websites I build/maintain (Melissa George, Elize du Toit, this one, My New York Wedding site, Our First Flat, Scilly Holiday), Projects I’ve started up (My social mash-up friend map, My family tree site, …) And many others I’ve probably forgotten. And that’s before I even start thinking about the sites I work on/with at Tamar. It’s a lot to remember! So I’m hoping to consolidate that down a bit… I think I’m going to start by closing my MySpace and Bebo accounts, since I haven’t got anything useful out of them for well over a year.

Take a photo every day

I know this seems slightly ironic given my point above, but little projects like this are what makes the internet fun for me. As I explained in a previous post, I’m going to aim to produce a “My year in photos” collection over 2010, with a photo for every single day of the year. And for those of you that follow me on Twitter and see what I usually Twitpic – don’t worry, I’ll try to keep the pictures of my son to a minimum, I promise!

Blog smarter

As I already explained in my very first post, I do quite a bit of blogging already – not just here (if you can even call my sporadic missives ‘blogging’), but on the Tamar blog, the Econsultancy blog, Media140 and a few others. But in 2010 I’m going to try to blog more – not necessarily *more* blogging, just smarter blogging. I definitely need to keep this place a bit more lively, and I might start inviting guest bloggers on if anybody wants to contribute. With my work blogs I’m going to try to blog more about subjects people actually want to read about – not just a vanity exercise. And particularly with my work blogs, I’m only going to blog if there’s a clear benefit to doing so – not for me, obviously, but for my work.

300 entries on my map by 2011

Another of my favourite little projects at the moment is my social mash-up friend map thingy (note to self: come up with a better name for it…). I’ve had some great new entries on it lately, including some famous faces you might recognise (if you can find them!). I think the map currently has 124 photos on it – by the end of 2010 I want to get that to 300, which I think is pretty achievable. Heck, I’ve got 700 connections on Facebook, plus well over 1,000 on Twitter – 300 is a reasonable-enough chunk of that to aim for…

Somehow top 2009

Thanks to the internet, I have been lucky enough to do some very cool (and some very odd) things the past few years. As well as an appearance in The Times, a few very unflattering appearances on London Tonight, a totally libelous appearance in a book (and several subsequent mentions on the radio because of it) and meeting a few cool famous peeople, 2009 was topped off with an appearance on BBC1′s ‘Imagine‘ and a trip to Downing Street. I’m not entirely sure I *can* top those. without doing something illegal, so maybe this is a tough one – but at the very least I’d like to think I’ll get to do other interesting things in 2010…