Drew B's take on tech PR

Growth hacking at 33 Digital

We've been busy in 33 Digital of late. We opened our Sydney office two months ago. Team 33 has been busy putting things in place in Paris and Munich which will both be opening soon, and this week I was in New York interviewing candidates and drinking vast quantities of good coffee. 

Four new offices in a year is proving to be an exciting special project, and soon we will look and feel like a very different company. 

If you are in social media consulting, based in Munich, Paris or New York and want to get involved somehow, have a read of this as a background and get in touch if you fancy meeting up for a coffee soon. 

CIPR and location based social media: an overview from yesterday's conference

I had the great pleasure of giving a talk yesterday at the annual CIPR Social Media conference. The topic was: 'beyond PR with location based social media'. 

The main point I was trying to get across is that location has infused into all mainstream social media, with every mobile status update, checking or Instagram having the option to include location data. Then with the continued evolution of dedicated location services such as Foursquare, and new 'body data' trends such as Quantified Self emerging, we're seeing the beginning of something very exciting for our industry. 

I only had 20mins and there was so much to say, I thought a recap and some bonus / backgrounders would be useful. First the bonus bits - aimed mainly at people who caught my talk and want some further reading: 

• My Foursquare experiment: what I found when I gamed foursuare (and reached a week high score of 500)
• What 'New Foursquare' means for brands
• A write-up of the Sentient World concept as delivered by Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang at Le Web London
• How Quantified Self / Body Data will bring a new dimension to digital comms (from my new blog BodyData.co.uk)

And here is a video overview of my talk, courtesy of the guys at the CIPR.  

 

 

We're hiring for social media roles in New York, Munich and Paris

Some fun times ahead. We are opening new offices in New York, Munich and Paris for 33 Digital. All the info on these roles is over on the 33 Digital site here. Do let me know if you are interested or know anyone wlse that might be. 

Thanks - Drew

It's been 13 years since I first moved to Tech City but I think the biggest changes are still to come

The news came out last night and was confirmed on the Prime Minister's website this morning, that the UK Trade & Industry body The Tech City Investment Organisation has appointed social media megastar, Facebook's Joanna Shields as its new CEO. As The Next Web puts it: she's coming to create London's Silicon Valley. 

In the announcement, Joanna is confirmed to also be taking up the roles of Business Ambassador for the Digital Industries and Chairman of the Tech City Advisory Group. It doesn't say exactly when she will start. Quotes in the appointment from David Cameron himself as well as two ministers underline the importance of this new appointment. 

Joanna Shields is Facebook's EMEA MD and a Vice President. Before that she had top jobs in Google, Bebo and AOL. Pretty awesome addition to the London tech scene, definitely something that will drive the area on both in business and in inspiration. 

I first moved to Tech City in 1999 as a student (inadvertently... it was just called Old Street back then) then worked there in the early noughties for a few years and have been there again since 2007. The area has completely transformed, but something tells me there is a lot more change still to come.

A novelist's view on the fusion of paper, ink and digital

I just came across an awesome blog post from a novelist called Charlie Stross about two brands I love: Moleskine and Evernote (who are also a client of ours). 

I have purchased two of the new Evernote Moleskines, which I hope to be receiving next week (I pre-ordered on launch day, a long time ago). But to read the thoughts of a novelist on the fusion of real and digital worlds I find fascinating. (he calls products that do this Spimes)

Here are a couple of excerpts from Charlie's blog post.

"...That is why I am currently intrigued by the new Moleskine/Evernote notebooks. Here we see spime-hood working in the opposite direction. Moleskine make high-quality old-fashioned paper and ink notebooks. Evernote provide a cloud based web clipping and notetaking service. One of Evernote's selling points is that they can carry out handwriting recognition on handwriting in photographs uploaded to the cloud. The new Moleskine notebooks represent a collision between the old and the new; you write in them, then photograph the pages using the Evernote app on your phone, and upload the images. Evernote performs de-skewing and colour correction, then handwriting recognition, making your text available and searchable. This is not the first hand-writing to cloud solution, of course. However, other systems that require proprietary paper and electronic pens (such as Livescribe) are less flexible; The Moleskine/Evernote system substitutes a generic smartphone for a specialised piece of electronics in the shape of a digital pen. And it further blurs the boundary between the physical, material artefact of the notebook, and the immaterial mutable data in the cloud." 

And: 

"One day the Internet will contain a model of everything around us. Indeed, most of the things around us will start their existence on the Internet as a piece of data, which will be instantiated in physical form. But not all of them; my cat is a spime, but she was instantiated via another cat! Her online presence exists solely in my vets' computer. And if I find myself writing longhand, as a way to address keyboard related injuries, does that mean that my future books will be spimes, which originated in the physical world and imploded into the Internet?"

I can't wait for my Moleskines to arrive. Thanks to Nixon Mcinnes for linking to this blog post. 

All about Meaning #meaningconf

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending Meaning, a conference all about making business fit for purpose in our inclement times. 

It was a stonker. Really fantastic quality of speakers and delegates (check out all the speakers here).

Highlights for me were David Heiatt, who founded new jeans company Hiut Denhim and formerly of Howies fame. He told a very engaging story about setting up a jeans company in Cardigan, where 10% of the population used to be employed in factories making jeans (and who all lost their jobs many years ago when the factories closed).

Host Will Mcinnes opening proceedings

Indy Johar and Stowe Boyd were also top quality. And Professor Karen Pine of the Iniversity of Hertfordshire who talked about retraining your brain to do things better / more efficiently / whatever you want. 

Vinay Gupta has a batch of videos of the talks, all available over on YouTube here, so you can go back through any of the content from the day.

Here's looking forward to next year's Meaning. 

Couple of bits in the media

Here are some links to a couple of articles I helped with this week: 

I wrote this for Haymarket's The Wall blog on social media schizophrenia after Waitrose & Clegg's gate

And helped with this piece in Yahoo News on the UK Cool Brands list which came out on Monday

$1m funding announced for tech startup PR firm AirPR

TechCrunch has just published an article about a yet-to-launch PR firm called AirPR having secured $1m of funding.

The article paints a bizarre picture of an industry (maybe it's a US picture?) where good PR costs too much for small companies to afford, and a good service is hard to find without networking. So AirPR is going to be launching with an online service that will help startups. 

I have worked in tech startups, for tech startups and in tech and startup specialist agencies since the late 90s. I know it's not easy for a brand to find a good consultant. It's a people business at the end of the day. Which is why a good service usually requires a serious budget too. So it will be interesting to see how AirPR will position itself. And how it will disrupt the PR industry. 

It's also interesting to see such an amount going into the funding of a new PR service. You don't see that every day. 

A busy week ahead and my bit from Channel 4 on social media

Social Media Week 2012 kicked off today. It's pretty insane how much is going on and the amount of media attention it has been generating. We've been building up to this week for a while helping to put on a number of the talks. 

I also had a fun Friday night as I was asked to go into Channel 4 to be the guy that sits with the news reader and gets asked their opinion about the news. The full news clip is below (off the 7 O'Clock News). Thanks Channel 4 for hosting me. 

And I was asked to say something about the new CoolBrands list which came out today, surprise surprise dominated by social media and tech brands. Busy week already and more to come...

And for my one thousand and fortieth blog post...

This blog is eight and a half years old and I've written 1,039 blog posts (1,040 including this one). I write a lot less than I used to. That's the Twitter effect I suppose, with my 17,400 tweets. 

As Twitter's time sink-hole continues to widen, I regularly think about how I could tweak the way I split my time across the web. 

This isn't an experiment, pledge or resolution of any kind. Just a note to readers of this blog and followers on Twitter that I'm going to be Tweeting a little less, pruning down the 1,700 following on there so that it's a bit closer to the 100 people that I'm friends with on Facebook, and I'm going to be blogging a bit more. 

If I learn anything useful in the process, I'll let you know.