Computer Weekly Editor's Blog

Vote now in our ComputerWeekly.com IT blog awards

2009-11-04T12:23:32Z

It's time to have your say and cast your vote in the 2009 ComputerWeekly.com IT blog awards, in association with IBM.

Now that our nominated blogs, and twitter users of the year, have been whittled down to manageable shortlists, it's time for IT professionals to decide who are the best blogs and twitterers.

So get stuck in and cast your vote, I am sure you will find some new blogs that will be valuable sources of information as you look through the shortlists.

This year we have received the highest ever number of nominations and the introduction of some increasingly competitive categories, such as IT professional male and the IT twitter user of the year awards, have introduced some controversy and excitement!

To view the shortlist and vote go to www.computerweekly.com/voteblogs.

I will confess its not been easy to set up the right categories for this year's blog awards, and we still haven't got it quite right yet, so we will keep tweaking each year. Click here to see the full list of categories and shortlisted blogs. I think of it like good web development - its a process of iteration. Each year we learn and improve for the next year.

However, I am sure you will find that there are some cracking blogs in each category and we will have some worthy winners.... go on have your say and cast your vote now!

Inspectagadget gets a new blogger... at last! LOL

2009-10-28T18:13:09Z

For sometime my colleague Faisal Alani has borne the brunt of producing content for our successful Inspectagadget blog.

Eventually, he persuaded me that he should have additional contributors. After a bit of arm twisting, I agreed, and we put a call out to our twitter community.

To say we were avalanched with queries would be an overstatement, but we did have quite a few. From that we have appointed Karl Hodge as part of the blogging team for Inspectagadget. Congratulations Karl, I know your posts will be informative, interesting and most importantly entertaining.

To see some of Karl's work see his latest two pieces:

1. Vodafone gets friendly with 360

2. Kindle coming to the Mac

Great stuff Karl - look forward to many more of your contributions.

One voice or many... the twitter conundrum for brands

2009-10-26T15:13:27Z

Two well-known brands - drinks company Innocent and online clothing retailer Asos.com - have totally different approaches to their employees' using social media under their brand name. These examples were taken from the media 140 event in London about brands.

Asos eCommerce director James Hart actually went round asking staff that he saw on twitter to add the brand name to their username, and use it to tell people what they're doing at work as well as just talking to their friends.

"We have 55 people on Twitter. I trust them and I see what they say because I follow them. We like to be where our customers are, and we adapt to the environment. I'm not really sure what to do with the official account. People search for Asos so we need something, but we don't really push products at them. I just want to talk to and learn from them."

By comparison, Ted Hunt, digital comms manager at Innocent, just has the one official account. Innocent isn't strict over internet communication - it doesn't monitor its blog comments, aside from comments with swearing in them. Negative comments stay up, and the company encourages interaction. But Ted says it's simply easier to control one Twitter account than 55.

"We keep it as a single Innocent drinks account. Otherwise it fragments too much and it's hard to control the message. It's easier to get a message out in one go. But we don't moderate strictly. In two years we've removed six comments. Negative comments stay up. We take down swearing as children come to the website."

It seems it's a horses for courses approach, some brands already have a strong voice and identity and so having lots of different voices twittering under the brand could harm it (Innocent would be a good example of this), while those trying to find a voice and personality may find several voices works best.

Controlling the message is a social media no no though and consumers can smell an over-corporatised twitter feed a mile off... enter and engage in conversations in an open and honest way. That's the message, ain't it?

Using social media to market your products: the case of Red Bull

2009-10-26T14:43:15Z

First session after lunch at Media140 is John Beasley, head of brand at Red Bull, who says social media plays a key role in the marketing of the company's products.

He says the important thing is to find something genuinely interesting to do with the medium. The company is prioritising its marketing to the extent that it says it wants it "to become the brand".

It uses everything from videos to iPhone apps to link its name to (and produce) unique content it thinks will excite people and get them interested in the brand. Beasley says the eventual aim is to monetise the content and get people to pay for it.

He says, "As a brand, we should only contribute when it works in the community. We need to be very targeted and responsible. You need to connect with and benefit with consumers. Communication is never just for it's own sake, and we hope to create something in the long term that will mean a consumer will have a better idea of us."

He says long-term commitment to social media is the only thing that will get it to work. The first thing the company did was create a presence online using MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

He says, "But we had to develop that though and use content . We found consumers wanted short bits of content that needed to be refreshed constantly. We also created lots of different points for consumers to discover us through."

Red Bull sponsors an F1 team and uses this to create content and engagement - staff in the pitt at a Grand Prix will twitter about what's happening, answering questions and talking to people. And alongside commitment and decent content, Beasley says honesty is needed - it's important not to be fake.

Red Bull doesn't really innovate through its products - it doesn't launch new products all the time, instead it innovates through its marketing. Not all companies would want or need to do as much as Red Bull has, but it provides a good example of what a company that relies fairly heavily on marketing can do with social media.

Using twitter well... some good examples of listening

2009-10-26T12:59:16Z

One of the better presentations so far at Media140 was Ciaran Norris's keynote "Learning to Listen", during which highlighted some of the good examples of companies that have listened well on twitter or other social media platforms.

Comcast, an ISP in the US, responds to every tweet complaining about their service. It got some great free publicity after responding to Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington's angry tweet - he later wrote a post saying how good they had been, which went out to his 3m readers.

Dominos faced a PR nightmare after two employees filmed themselves putting pizzas up their noses while at work. It's a little unclear as to why this was fun, but it must have appealled to some people because it got 600,000 views on YouTube. The company took 48 hours to respond, but their video got 1m views in the end, so the positive appeared to outweigh the negative.

First Direct feeds every comment about the company onto its site - both positive and negative. It has the potential to backfire, but it does show customers that it appears to be listening, and it creates one space where staff can see every comment made.

But not everyone gets it right. I wasn't able to get down all the details but Ryanair staff attacked and argued with a blogger on a blog discussion board, for daring to suggest he found a bug on their site. He was relatively polite but they insulted and threatened him. When Ryanair did come up with a formal response, they stuck to their guns, callin him an "idiot blogger" and saying they wouldnt listen to anyone like him. Not the way to do it.

Ciaran is a former colleague of mine at Reed Business Information, we worked on CatererSearch together... Ciaran was our SEO point man, now he is head of social marketing for Mindshare.

What is it with twitter and ROI?

2009-10-26T11:24:16Z

So far the media140 event on Everything a brand needs to know about twitter and real-time social media has been heavy on hot air and light on substance.

In some respects that's not surprising, twitter and real-time social media are still babies in the human development analogy. Many companies are still grappling with what they mean for their brands, for their customer service, for their communication strategies....you could go on.

That's why when the evangelists are often asked to demonstrate some ROI, the concrete examples are hard to come by. What is true though is that there is increasing awareness of twitter and social media and companies are scrambling to play in the space.

The conference's keynote "Why pay attention to twitter and real-time social media?" by Tom Bedecarre, chief exec of agency AKQA, said: "Our clients are asking us to engage in social media - its the number one thing that clients are asking for now."

He admitted there's a lot more conversation than there is money spent at the moment, but that most campaigns at his agency now have a social element.

Its a growth area, look at the amount of social media jobs being advertised, its the only sector in the recruitment industry that is growing right now.

US cable TV company Comcast now employs 12 people to field customer service enquiries through twitter.

Gap asked AKQA to do its autumn campaign for denim, traditionally run through outdoor and TV media, through social media. It is essentially a Facebook campaign around the tag line borntofit. Its all also all about the customers sharing experiences and collaborating with the brand.

Tom said it was too early to say whether its been successful yet, just six weeks in, but its proof of how brands and companies now feel the need to play in the social media space to get their mesage across and communicate with their customers.

So for compnies that aren't using social media there is a school of thought that says its worth just getting out there and doing it... there's also a feeling that there needs to be a strategy to underpins what you do.

If you're not sure how to get started don't worry there are hundreds of self-defined social media experts out there, just search through twitter, you'll find a few, I can assure you.

One thing is for sure you can't ignore social media and twitter, there is no doubt it is increasingly becoming part of communication and brand strategies.... even if the ROI is hard to pinpoint at the moment.

Should you keep your clothes on or take them off for chariteee... debate about the Nude London tech calendar

2009-10-23T07:19:10Z

There's a great debate going on about whether the women taking part in Nude London tech calendar are harming their careers, or giving them a boost, on our WITsend blog?

Yes its sad that this debate has focused on the role of women in this calendar, but that's hardly surprising as the tech industry is trying harder than most to try and get greater recognition for the role of the women in the sector.

What is interesting is the viewpoint expressed by Eileen Burbridge, that you can't be taken seriously as a successful businesswoman in tech (a sector that is still in the dark ages when it comes to their representation) if you take your clothes off, whether its for charity or not.

And on this point I tend to agree with Eileen, it ain't going to do you any favours and enhance your career. Not just from your peers, but also maybe from your employees, who may not agree with your libralism.

I'm all for the sector having a bit of fun, not taking itself too seriously and trying to shake off its unsexy image, in order to make itself more attractive as a sector to pursue a career in...I'm just not sure that a nude calendar is the best way to do that.

Offering exciting, dynamic, fast moving, creative and rewarding careers that offer equal opportunities for men and women alike is surely a better way to do that.

Windows 7 - everything you need to know

2009-10-21T10:05:47Z

Ahead of the Windows 7 launch tomorrow, we have pulled together a comprehensive guide to Windows 7 that includes the best of ComputerWeekly's content with a selection of the best content from around the web. Take a look and enjoy!

Windows 7 - a comprehensive guide

Do you want to come to my Windows 7 launch party? No I didn't think so

2009-10-20T12:09:11Z

Sometimes you stumble across something that is so excruciatingly painful that it deserves comment.

After yesterday's post highlighting how Microsoft would not repeat its mistakes of before and botch the release of Windows 7 like it had Vista three years ago, I came across a very good article in the Economist called Clash of the Clouds.

The piece looks at Windows 7 as heralding a new era in personal computing where all the information will be stored in the cloud in huge data centres that dish up data over the internet to users via browsers, smartphones or other "client devices".

In other words, the launch of Windows 7 marks the end of personal computing as we have known it, cloud services will dominate from now on and this must be worrying for Microsoft's future business model.

More worrying for Microsoft is this cringeworthy video on how to host your own launch party for Windows 7 - yeh right! Who at Microsoft dreamed this up? I thought Microsoft had turned its PR around and was starting to make headway and then you see something like this - this is why Microsoft isn't cool like Apple.

Choices: Hold a launch party for Windows 7 or play a round of golf or watch X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing? I know what I'd prefer to be doing. Particularly after watching this fingernail rasping video produced presumably by Microsoft on how to hold your own launch party!

I love the line towards the end: "Can you believe that Microsoft put the launch of Windows 7 in our hands. Are they nuts or what?" "Maybe by letting you be involved!"

Too right by letting you lot get involved in this toe-curling video. Not sure if this has helped increase the buzz about Microsoft's Windows 7 launch in the USA, but Microsoft's marketing department shoudl know that it doesn't transalte well across the Atlantic in the UK! It is interesting that the comments on this video has been disabled - wonder why? And of course there are planty of spoofs on YouTube already, my favourite is at the bottom of this post.

So please don't expect an invite to my Windows 7 launch party, because I won't be having one.

If you want to know in advance what features of Windows 7 that might annoy you take a look at this photo story on the Dirty Dozen of Windows 7.

Microsoft's Windows 7 launches this week - will Microsoft get the launch of Windows 7 right?

2009-10-19T16:45:35Z

This week is massive for Microsoft. It really is a big deal that the US software giant gets its new operating system Windows 7 off to a flying start, particularly as the Vista launch three years ago was such a flop.

I don't think anyone expects Microsoft to repeat the same mistakes again with Windows 7 ....and in many cases the early reviews have been favourable. Windows 7 appears to be fast, secure and reliable and most importantly is compatible with early versions of Windows family... incompatibility was a disaster for Vista.

However, while we don't expect a botched launch, it will be polished, a BBC article poses the question, will this be Microsoft's most successful, yet last operating system launch?

It's a good point. Microsoft's new product could well be its best operating system, but is it its business model that needs updating?

Many analysts expect businesses to adopt Windows 7 OS quicker than they have upgraded in the past, particularly as Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP in April 2014.

For now the PC and Windows is still king in the enterprise, but with the rise of browser based applications and Google Chrome OS next year, how long will this remain the case. This could mean that the dominating factors that drive enterprises to stick within the Microsoft family, become less important.

In many ways it is that is a bigger threat to Microsoft than a botched Windows 7 release... having said that though a botched release, would be a killer, following the failure of Vista. I really don't expect that to happen again. As I said all early commentary has generally given Windows 7 a thumbs up, even if it is a bit safe.

That's why we did a rather mischievous piece that listed the features in Windows 7 that may bug you.

Media 140 event in London looks at how brands should use real-time social media

2009-10-16T13:41:37Z

There are a few online tools, such as twitter, YouTube and Facebook, that are by their very nature born out technology.

That's why we cover them... they are web services that have made a fundamental difference to the way we consume and find information online, and they also give us the opportunity to do other things, that we hadn't before, such as collaborate and share online in real time.

For me, tools like twitter blurr the lines between technology and marketing. Twitter is a great, probably the best example, of a new breed of social media tools that offers businesses, and individuals, a great opportunity to collaborate and communicate better with their customers, consumers, colleagues and friends.

Traditionally, this is the preserve of marketeers..... often the marketeers don't understand the technology, or how people interact and work online, and hence there's some almighty mistakes! We have documented some of the worst marketing blunders on twitter previously - it's worth another look, if you're interested in this topic!

There is often resistance to using social media tools by businesses, simply because their control and command culture is weakened. Businesses find it harder to micro manage their communications and shock horror, they actually mean conversing with real customers/consumers!

Those businesses who have got it and are using the likes of twitter really well, find it hugely rewarding...it's a great way to build your brand reputation, get closer to your customers and share and communicate with them on a personal level... and not a faceless corporate level.

If you you want to find out more about this...then the Media140 event in London on 28 October is a great place to start: Everything a brand needs to know about twitter and real-time social media is dedicated to helping businesses build online brands and has a great line up of speakers and brands, including Paul Hoskins Head of Customer Experience EasyJet
and Ted Hunt Digital Communications Manager from Innocent drinks.

Our friends at Media140 have granted us a promotion code, which will get our readers a £40 discount to the conference - just quote ComputerWeekly, when booking your ticket to claim. See you there

Eureka moment absent at AOP summit

2009-10-07T16:12:31Z

I've learned a few interesting things at the Association of Online Publishers event today, but no eureka moments... a bit disappointing really.

But then is it surprising that when you get a bunch of media owners together in a room that what you get is several bland platitudes and nothing of real substance that makes you think wow they've cracked it!

There's been a fair bit of navel gazing, and there's also been some good speakers, but what have we really learned that we didn't already know?

Online publishers find monetisation a challenge, journalists find the new ways of publishing a challenge and the growth of the internet continues to march on at a pace that often leaves everyone behind.

Being fleet of foot and agile makes a difference, but is that because these companies often adopt and use technology to grow their business and provide a better experience for their audience. More techies in media land... perhaps that's what we need!

Social optimisation will overtake search optimisation in driving traffic to websites

2009-10-07T10:18:58Z

So two things that have been said so far at today's of Association of Online Publishers conference that really resonate with technology and making online media profitable are:

Firstly social optimisation will overtake search optimisation in terms of driving traffic to websites: Good news for social media experts/consultants and there is no shortage of these. Just check the twitter profiles of your followers.

Secondly, that media companies that use technology as revenue generator rather than a cost centre are the winners. A good example from Shawn Colo of Demand Media he said was the San Fransisco chronicle, which has used technology to drive bigger audiences.

Demand Media is an interesting case study in new media publishers that have really grabbed the opportunities of online publishing and grown exponentially.

One interesting point, also made by Shawn, was that you can still make money out of good, evergreen content, and that this will generate a longer return on investment than buying traffic through SEM.

This content must be quality and not commodity, ie not based exclusively on news, and helps people make decisions to problems they have. The great thing is that if these problems don't go away, so the traffic keeps coming back for the answers.

Technology and online media - challenges for media companies

2009-10-07T08:56:50Z

Today's Association of Online Publishers' conference from Islington, north London, should be interesting in the way the debate embraces technology and technology developments, such as the advent of the iPhone app and how that may allow publishers to charge for content again.

This will be the big debate at the AOP today. How can publishers monetise their content online and technology may help them do that.

Key buzzowrds today will be: paid for content, Murdoch; iPhone Apps; twitter and online advertising...I'll try and post a few more updates as the day goes on and will be tweeting at http://twitter.com/jamesga if you want to follow more updates.

Upgrade to Windows 7? Steve Ballmer needs another song and dance

2009-10-02T10:30:03Z

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer is in London to convince businesses that they should upgrade to the new versions of the Windows desktop and server operating systems.
As with previous releases, Microsoft has focused on lowering the IT management costs of running desktop computers. The security of corporate data is also a priority, with Microsoft extending its BitLocker disc encryption technology to support removable discs.

The IT industry has changed significantly since Windows Vista was released two years ago. In the worst economic crisis for years, the last thing IT directors want to do is ask the board to pay for a desktop operating system upgrade.

The only strong argument for upgrading is that the company remains on a supported platform. IT directors say they will upgrade Microsoft's server operating system, Windows Server 2008 R2, as and when hardware is replaced. They see benefit in the server upgrade, but few are planning major upgrades to Windows 7 on the desktop in 2010.

The economic climate is wrong, and some IT directors regard desktop upgrades as discretionary spend. This is certainly not what Ballmer wants to hear. For the past 15 years each new version of Microsoft software has promised gains in productivity, free additional software and improved security.

Microsoft should be commended for its Trustworthy Computing effort, which has raised the level of IT security across the industry. The new Security Essentials add-on provides every end-user with baseline security. But its product development model of providing more free software with each operating system release is unsustainable.

Finally, there is a big question over desktop productivity because it is hard to quantify. To make the next release of Windows a success Microsoft needs to listen to what IT directors want. So Steve, it certainly does not look like people are ready for a desktop upgrade, irrespective of how much you sing its praises.