Drew B's take on tech PR

Monrovia's Day Talk blackboard / newspaper

A feature in the Monocle podcast today got me leafing back through the October edition of the magazine to see this article on Monrovia's 'Daily Leaf'. It's described as a newspaper but is in fact a bunch of blackboards edited to present live news updates to passer by. It apparently has a daily readership running into the thousands, has ad space for sale (you can just about see it in the below pic) and regularly causes traffic jams.

Sunday Times butchers a good story

The Sunday Times has a full page feature on Twitter today. With the hook of the investment that Twitter landed this week, valuing the company at $1bn.

But the article will make you fall asleep. With random errors such as misspelling of the name of Twitter's only ever acquisition, to the fact that every single quote in the article is from an American analyst, I find the article a real bore. It's on page five of the business section in case you want to have a look. Zzzz.

Looks like the @conversationage 100 PR people on Twitter list has three @33digital-s in it

Neville Hobson just pointed me to the Conversation Agent 100 PR people to follow on Twitter list, a global list of PR people, and it's nice to tee that it has (at first count) has three of 33 Digital in it.

Why my posts will be shorter and more frequent from now on

Apart from my big essay-style posts, I'm blogging a lot less than I used to. And it's something I'm seeing in many others. It's not just that other shorter form social networking places have dragged me away, but it's also the time it takes to draft a long blog post. I just don't have so much time for it at the moment. I've seen some people leave altogether and use systems like Posterous and Friendfeed instead (Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel are examples). Blogging is getting a run for its money.

But recently two things have been pushing me back here towards my blog: ownership of content, and post length.

First the ownership. The fact is that all this content I'm ploughing into Twitter and Facebook is like water down the drain. You don't own your content and when you try to find it one day in the future, you'll struggle. I've tried. So because of that, I'll be posting here a bit more often.

Second, the post length. I find it a bit too much sometimes to put a whole blog post together when I can summarise in 140 characters on Twitter. But stating the obvious, 140 characters isn't often enough space to say what you want to.

So I'm going to be using a different posting style to balance the less frequent essays with more frequent observations. Shorter and quicker, probably written more often on my mobile (like this is now).

So forgive the lack of links, images, video inside my posts. They're staying elsewhere. And this will probably be one of the longer ones for a while.

The role of social and digital media in business consulting: Dachis acquires Headshift

Some of my industry peers are talking online this morning about the significance of the acquisition of Headshift, the social business consulting firm, by Dachis Group, the one year old US based acquisitive social technologies company.

Some facts about this move, as I think it's significant for any consultancies operating under the influence (of social / digital media). Dachis is headed by former CEO and founder of Razorfish. It is a very young company, using a $50m pot of money from Austin Ventures to acquire companies that fulfill on its promise "to unlock the value of social technologies for large corporate enterprises" through design, advisory and technology implementation. The size of the deal as yet has not come out.

Headshift is a very smart firm in my view. I've been impressed with their people and their approach, and they have worked into other parts of their clients' business, not just marketing and communications which is the most common place to see social and digital media work being done.

I see this happening increasingly - consultancies advising parts of the business outside of just the media departments. Naturally media facing departments react to the changing media ecosystem, but businesses want business consultancy too, and it's plain to see that a company's behaviour in these digital times is not just communication. It's customer service, research & development, decision-making, even accounting. It is certainly our experience here at #33 that partly because relatively few people know how to navigate the changing digital landscape intuitively and partly because business disciplines are overlapping increasingly in these social media times.

To go back to my first point, some of my peers are talking about this deal today (here, here and here). 'Social Business' is the moniker being bandied about. I think that to take the word 'consultancy' out of the Headshift tagline removes its true meaning. Social business is not what this is. Business consulting with a deep knowledge of social media is different, it's in high demand and I hope the new Dachis Headshift partnership will continue to prosper in this sector.