I have decided to move this blog (as well as my other online activities) under one banner http://fransgaard.com
Read all about the move here: http://fransgaard.com/why-i-am-moving-from-posterous-to-wordpress/
Big thanks to Posterous.
You may have walked around in a city before; you may even have walked around in London before. But then you tried Oxford Street!
You entered with confidence, but quickly you realise any direction you walk everybody is walking the other way. You almost get run over by a bicycle and you are hit left and right by phone cards and charity requests. Only 15 metres later you give up and return to the comfort of the nearest pub. You, the experienced walker, have failed!
IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THAT WAY!
I just walked Oxford Street from Tottenham Court Road to Selfridges at lunch time on a sunny Friday in under 10 minutes and without upsetting my fellow pedestrians!
YOU CAN DO IT TOO! HERE IS HOW:
1: Look for behaviour in other walkers
Groups of people walk in a similar fashion. Bunch of teens will walk slowly but with consistent speed. Busy business people will walk fast but constantly be forced to stop as they don’t look for patterns and shoppers will ram through anybody standing in front of the shop door.
Men tend to walk with more purpose, but without looking ahead resulting in them having to stop. Women on the other hand are better at looking a head, but can often decide to suddenly walking in a random unexpected direction.
As you get more experienced walking Oxford Street you will do this automatically but as a newbie make a point of observing other walkers consciously to begin with.
2: Look for patterns in traffic
Traffic can also give you valuable information for the walking conditions ahead. Look for intervals in traffic lights, road works ahead and listen for sirens. Busses blocking crossings can also be valuable in helping you cross red lights.
3: Walk in the outer lane away from shop entrances
Shop doors should be avoided as shoppers coming out have had their fix and are relaxed and walk very slowly while laughing and stuff.
Only exception is close to bus stops. They tend to gather standing people and since they are normally not built in front of doors it makes sense to walk around them using the inside lane but remember to get out again before you hit the next shop door.
4: Walk a consistent pace and with a clear direction
Choose a consistent pace and direction. Look up and straight ahead so people can see where you are heading.
If heading for a crash with another oncoming pedestrian avoid “the dance” by walking clearly in one direction lifting your opposite arm slightly pointing the side you want the other person to go to. Avoid making an obvious pointing gesture so the oncoming person feel they chose to go that way of own free will.
5: Use sun glasses
It works for men and women alike. Wearing sun glasses gives you a Matrix like power to separate people.
6: Walk behind other people with a purpose
Other more experienced walkers know these tricks. If you spot one, walk behind the person. They will deal with the brunt of the oncoming force and you will learn a trick or two as well for your next solo walk.
7: Do not walk close to kids with or without parents
It is tempting to walk behind kids especially if they are using a faster means of transport such as push bikes or baby strollers. While they may seem speedy and good at spearheading through oncoming crowd, this is often a short-lived bonus as they can suddenly grind to a halt due to an accident or a hissy fit.
8: Avoid charity workers or people handing out stuff
This is easier said than done but first of all try to time you passing these when they engage with other pedestrians.
And try to walk behind them. It doesn’t matter how close as long as you are outside their field of vision. Indeed, walking close may trick other people trying to catch you to think you have engaged with this particular person.
Avoid conversation of all cost.
9. Make way for older ladies and families
It is only polite and they are too slow to move out of the way anyway.
10. Avoid Tourists
This is a big time saver! Avoid tourists at all costs.
They will always stand in the middle of the pavement and the more they are the more they will spread out in a line across your path using maps and umbrellas to further extend their barrier.
There are essentially only two ways of dealing with tourists:
Bonus tip:
Walk behind hot women! They tend to part the crowd, especially during spring/summer. This works even if you are a woman yourself. You will just reinforce the effect.
Watch out for big groups of approaching half-drunk men who may think this is a good chance to find a future bride. They can cause a blockage even if you (or the hot woman) don't agree.
I read an article today from PR Week about how PR agencies are better positioned to take on social media:
"Of the 78 respondents, 90 per cent said they thought PR agencies were the best-placed marketing discipline to do work in social media."
Ofcourse there is a danger the article is biast towards PR, but 90% is still a very high number that needs to be taken seriously.
I get it! It does make sense even though as a digital professional I sit on the other side of the table. Let's look at the digital industry:
Both disciplines are about speed wins, either as users navigating to their goals or as ads selling above other things shouting for the users attention.
PR to me is different: It is about building longer relationships and it is about conversation as in listening, learning from listening and responding.
For many digital agencies social media is about the channels Facebook, Twitter, Blog etc. For some of the better ones it is also about personas and user groups. But digital agencies are used to dealing with projects with a defined life span. They are used to package and deliver stuff. Done and dusted.. bring the next one!
PR has an interest in creating a longer-term, ongoing conversation which can result in both a retainer contract with a client or consultancy services to review client's inhouse efforts on a regular basis because the client is also interested in keeping the conversation going. Both contracts creates a relationship with the client to help their relationship with their customers. Great for the cash flow and a win win situation for everybody.
Can the digital industry do this?
Ofcourse we can!
But we need to start thinking about solutions in open-ended continuous steps rather than boxed-in projects.
We need to have a plan extending far beyond the first simple project we've been asked to deliver. What do we suggest the client next? Where do we want to take their audience next? Where do the audience want to go next?
This plan will be an agency investment. But it will be a roadmap of suggested steps/projects that one after another will enforce the success of the whole solution making the agency an irreplaceable partner to client because even if you showed the roadmap to the client, it would still have to be updated regularly to react to the flow of the customers' movements.
I read some user feedback the other day.
Some users thought forums where place for geeks, pointless and time wasters... even though they may never have used a forum themselves. Equally Wiki was seen as something techy and geeky... again not necessarily based on any experience.
But they did recognise the words so it's very much a case of a little knowledge can be more dangerous than no knowledge.
I concluded an interesting point revolving around social media; New words scare people.
This made me look back and review how my approach to selling social media has changed and yes, I do tend to avoid any social media related words these days.
Why? Because clients are ordinary people. Many of them have just recently gotten used to the fact they have a website or an e-newsletter. Many of them pride themselves with having finally learned to use the content management system, and so they should be! It is not their full-time job to work with the Internet on a daily basis like it is for web professionals.
My philosophy has essentially become: Names aren't important so stick with words people know, preferably from the real word to take it away from that scary thing called the Internet.
So I was thinking back on what words I've used recently to describe social media and here are some I could remember using:
This approach does not assume clients are stupid and most of them will have heard the correct terms, but to many it is all new and, more importantly, untried stuff and when push comes to shove clients will invest their money in things they know work, especially in the current economic climate. Giving them a reference point to something they know helps them visualise the potential and see beyond the words.
Photo: Chemical Brothers Round House, London *
I am sitting here eating breakfast in the morning sun looking over the London skyline.
My wife is checking an eBay auction on her iPhone and I am considering migrating this Posterous blog to a dedicated WordPress blog on one of my domains.
In the distance somebody is trying to set up some music with iTunes but it crashes with a loud system noise... The day is already digital.
It wasn't always like that though.
As a kid I grew up in a 400 people strong village in a forgotten corner of Denmark. Isolated from any "thought-mates" I spent a lot of time reading books and the dystopian world of Cyberpunk Scifi guided by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neil Stephenson. And I loved it and wanted to live in that world.
Lately Neil Stephenson has been in my mind for his book The Diamond Age which features an interactive book called the Primer which draws parallels to the iPad.
There are lots of lists of how which scifi gadgets are now reality and which aren't (where are the flying cars?), but in my mind it is not the hardware that is defining whether that cyberpunk world is here or not; It is how we interact with technology and how we have become linked into the information network and become part of it.
It is not whether we have cybernetic implants; It is whether the low sound of information technology is humming in the background.
And it is. The cyberpunk world I dreamt about is here.
I can feel the information flowing around me everywhere in London; People talking into to thin air because they use handless headset for their phones; students with notebooks so familiar to them it is part of their clothes like shoes; Businessmen so addicted to their blackberries they don't even look up at the hot women walking by and old people on their mobile phones to their families.
A friend of mine once said about the book Pattern Recognition: "William Gibson is best when nothing is happening". That to me encapsulates Cyberpunk in one sentence.
And that is why Cyberpunk to me is reality now. Information technology was never "here it is, tadaaaaa!" it just came slowly sneaking in underneath us and is now humming hypnotically away in the background... Except the guy finally got his iTunes working outside... not sure I like his playlist.
* The day ended in true Cyberpunk fashion with Chemical Brothers gig. I was hoping to get a good photo of the sea of tiny mobile phone screens pointing to the stage, but my iPhone didn't do a good job. All things equal, their stage visuals where very 80s Cyberpunk so they'll have to do.
This post is not a top ten answers to using hash tags. It is merely my thoughts on them so don't take this as a definitive guide.
Hash tags is a bit of a weird one and consequently I rarely use them in my tweets because they take up precious tweet characters which could be utilised better (for example to leave enough characters for other users to be able to retweet).
I have also found that several tweeting people (not only newbies) don't even know what has tags are which means they then just get in the way of the legibility of the tweet itself.
One thing is clear to me though: Hash tags are not keywords. There is no need to put # in front of words you want people to find when they search Twitter. All words are searchable in all tweets.
Defining a single-minded purpose via has tags
Hash tags are good for grouping a single-minded purpose. One of the few hash tags I use is #followfriday which serves a single ongoing purpose in allowing tweeters to promote other twitter streams to their followers. Consequently clicking a #followfriday allows you to see what other tweeters you are not necessarily following recommend as well and who knows? maybe you find something good.
Grouping time-limited conversations
Another recent hash tag I've used is #leadersdebate which helped structure the twitter conversations regarding the recent UK election. Both private people, professionals (journalists) and the politicians themselves used it making this hash tag very useful to keep up with the latest in the election.
Collection location-based tweets
I have yet to use this myself but I have seen very effective uses of hash tags to bind tweets together around a location/event allowing people physically at the same location to see each others tweets. This not only groups tweets which often are only relevant to other event attendees, it also opens up for the possibility to meet and network over a real life cup of coffee.
Quirky and innovative uses of hash tags
I haven't seen loads of really innovative uses of hash tags but one that springs to mind is #~~> which is an arrow you can fire at your local MP to alert them to the Robin Hood Tax concept.
And since this hash tag is so unique it becomes very trackable.
...but is it too clever? Well, I did a search on Twitter for #~~> which surprisingly returned no results (I know there should be at least one tweet) and searching for ~~> without the # returns "forbidden" so potentially you do need to include a standard letter for a given hash tag to work.
A final word on over-use of hash tags and use of generic has tags
It is important to use detailed hash tags and not to over use them. Look at this tweet:
Love playing #finalfantasy13 on #microsoft #xbox. #games
Too many hash tags and too generic hash tags in my view... I mean how many #games tweets do you think fit the subject on the game Final Fantasy 13?
How many hash tags should that tweet have? I would argue it shouldn't have any at all as they all just serve as keyword pointers.
Love playing Final Fantasy 13 on microsoft xbox.
Where a hash tag would work is it the tweet for example said:
Love playing Final Fantasy 13 on microsoft xbox at #extralife charity event.
These are my thoughts on hash tags. Please do share any comments or thoughts on hash tags as they are quite the tricky ones to get right.
I do not read Japanese (yet) recently so what I have done is I've set up a twitter list only with Japanese tweets. That way I can access it in Google Chrome and get it translated to English. However, I have noticed that some of the translated tweets end up with some 300 characters... more than double the 140 allowed. That's cheating! I think Japanese tweets should be restricted to 70 characters to equal the playing field :-D But seriously, to me it looks like Twitter has a real reach within languages that essentially makes better use of their characters and I can understand from a Skype chat I just had a American/Japanese connection I know from the Kansai centred KdL linkedin group that Chinese may be even better suited for restricted text lengths.
http://tsubuyaku.fm/ is the first Japanese-only twitter application I have seen, but the fact there is one, supports that Twitter may be getting it right with the Japanese marked.
I am a big Japanofile and am slowly learning to speak Japanese, but of course the language, especially the written part, is a barrier for me to digest Japanese content.
The latest beta version of Google Chrome offers auto translate facility which quite successfully can translate between languages within same language group. For example it can successfully translates Danish to understandable English.
However, it is only semi-successful in translating full websites/chunks of content from Japanese to English, the two languages being further apart.
This is where Twitter comes in. With the 140 character limit it forces everyone to talk in short sentences. This makes it a lot easier for Google to translate the short Japanese sentences into English that makes sense.
The downside is that Google translates the whole page not individual paragraphs so for this to work I've set up a Twitter list with only the Japanese tweets I follow and it works like a charm.
My wife (@ddotark) and I are both fans of Danny Choo, the King of the Otaku. He is currently in London and we were ofcourse hoping he would do his famous Storm Trooper Dance while he is here.
If you have seen the movie Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist then I'd say our hunt for Danny Choo today is in many ways similar to the hunt for Fluffy in the movie. (if you haven't seen it, see it!).
Anyway, our day went something like this.
Morning
We wake up and are roaming around doing various random stuff.
App. 1pm
We realise we haven't eaten anything yet so quickly chuck on some random clothes and decide to head for BentoBox in Camden to get... well... a bentobox.
14.17At the very same moment I ask for the bill, My wife notice this tweet:
@dannychoo: Will be filming in armor from now at Tower Bridge > St Pauls, Westminster, Piccadilly, Oxford St. Heading out now. 東京トルーパーロンドンで活動してきます。
Before I'd finished entering my PIN my wife was already out of the door cursing the fact we didn't bring our camera so were stuck with iPhones (although I'm sure she secretly was happy about wearing one of her Star Wars hats)
After a quick tactical assessment we decide to head for St Paul's so we would be there when he came from Tower Bridge.
30 minutes later
We arrive at St. Pauls and what an awesome day it is. We sit and enjoy the sun waiting for Danny Choo to arrive. No Dancing Trooper in sight, but what a lovely day.
3.16 pm
While dosing in the sun we notice a tall asian guy in a blue top with a hat walking around with an entourage of people. We quickly wake up as we figure it may be Danny Choo doing some location scouting before putting his trooper armour on (but why the entourage??) Anyway the guy walks away and we stalk him and his friends all the way back to the tube station before we reach the conclusion: It is probably not the right guy.
10 minutes later
We return to our sunny spot. Doing a bit of Twitter search on "Stormtrooper" we find this encouraging tweet:
@Roybott: http://twitpic.com/1ekzk2 - Why is there a dancing stormtrooper here?
Awesome! Roybott has unknowingly told us Danny Choo is now at Tower Bridge.
I decide to buy a couple of ice creams while we wait which comes with the insane price tag of £7 altogether! ... or so I thought. I pay the man £7 for the two ice creams and he says "It's £10" ... and I swear while I pay the rest.
3.33 pm
A pigeon with a mohawk makes us forget about the expensive ice creams.
4.46 pm
Still no dancing Star Wars characters, but we are kept entertained by random people walking by.
6pm
St. Paul's Cathedral closes. No Trooper... we reluctantly decide to abandon our post on the stairs (the sun is gone now anyway).
A bit past 6pm
Sitting in the tube we decide to give the hunt for the Tokyo Trooper one last shot and head for Oxford Circus.
10 minutes later
We pop out at Oxford Circus but no Dancing Trooper and no sign of any Star Wars related activities... then we see this tweet:
@mattlopezdias A japanese stormtrooper just walked past me along the thames. he had his helmet in him hand. Pfffft no dicipline these super fans.
Is he heading to St Paul's now???
Back down the tube.
10 minutes later
Back at St Paul's which is close to void of people by now. Why would anybody dance here?
Quick check on Twitter confirms Danny isn't heading this way:
@TerriAnnB http://twitpic.com/1em9ae Stormtrooper on southbank.
Big Ben in the background! He's by-passing St. Paul's and going for Westminster. Quick grab a cab!
One cheaper-than-two-ice-creams cab ride later
We are on the North side of the river now. No sign of any Stormtroopers.
We decide to walk to the southside across Westminster Bridge and grab a bus home.
Just before we reach the bus stop we spot a Stormtrooper on the other side... could it be...
A quick dash of death across the road (Yikes!) and we are finally standing in front of a rather polite Stormtrooper who after a few photos with the public turns on his ipod and does the Tokyo Trooper Dance!
We have found him at last!
The UK is gearing up for election soon. Our current prime minister is Gordon Brown from the Labour Party.
I was reading this article which led me to the Twitter of Sarah Brown (the wife of Gordon Brown).
Her Twitter has a healthy 1,117,877 followers, but what is really interesting is that the official Twitter for the Labour Party has a comparatively lower number of followers 13,144.
This is following the trend in corporate twitter streams: If senior figure within an organisation tweets, they tend to tweet the same as their organisation's twitter. But their personal twitter stream will also have personal tweets inserted here and there.
While these personal tweets may seem random and may even be irrelevant they actually boosts the overall message by adding meat and credibility to the more "salesy" tweets. They become real.
Consequently these personal twitter streams often (almost always) seem to have a far higher number of followers and I suspect these followers also pay more attention.
This makes me wonder; if people follow personalities rather than brands, how will that affect a brand if a person then decide to move over to a competitor?
I can't help but think about the very popular TV presenter Jonathan Ross who is now leaving the TV channel BBC; will he bring a big portion of his viewers with him to wherever he goes? I think he will.
And I think increasingly this will happen with twitter/blog/social media stars as well; People will be loyal to the person, not the brand.
