Disqus - Friends of kmanaveeyan

Re: Legal Crackdown Jams Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising

Dan Thornton — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:20:45 -0000

As a non U.S resident, I'm increasingly annoyed by artists and companies constantly doing interesting things with their U.S rights, and not allowing anyone else in on the fun - but I think in this case, Michael Moore has been with Miramax, and therefore the Weinstein's for years.

The answer is simple. I'll just make sure I never pay money to see anything coming out of the Weinstein company again (http://www.weinsteinco.com/) whether that's through piracy, or simply abstaining from their films.

Re: Yay

Dan Thornton — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:09:34 -0000

Marketing? Marketing?...lol. Seriously, congrats on joining the list, and inspiring me to make sure you don't start catching me!

<abbr></abbr><abbr>Dan Thorntons last blog post..Getting Shirky on camera</abbr>

Re: Would You Like to Make Money with Music?

Dan Thornton — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 05:27:30 -0000

This seems to be the way the music industry is headed, as it allows artists etc to take advantage of the resources record companies traditionally promoted, whilst not having to hope they are the flavour of the month to get signed in the first place - and without essentially have to pay back an advance loan.
There are some alternatives out there, like www.slicethepie.com so it just means seeing which ones have enough members to get some bands out there to get publicity for the service and have enough members to reach a tipping point.

Re: http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/27/survey-shows-web-20-makes-its-way-into-the-work-place/

Dan Thornton — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:27:43 -0000

Whilst I sympathise with the problems of managing large scale IT infrastructures, surely this proves employees will always utilise tools outside the corporate firewall, and therefore, IT management would be far better off if they spent the time and effort necessary to educate users, rather than restrict them?
Putting personal use to one side, the other big driver I've seen for using software outside the firewall is because it's far quicker and easier when it's needed to complete an urgent task, than trying to get IT approval and installation - so employees under pressure take what they perceive is the quickest and easiest route.

Re: Social Media For Small Business: Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse

Dan Thornton — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:43:02 -0000

A new Chinese takeaway did a great job when it originally opened near me. Not only did it send out a pack including a letter describing why it was good, a menu, a voucher for free beer etc, but every time I ordered from them, I'd get a phone call 2-3 hours later from the shop, asking if the meal was OK...

It's the only time I've known it to happen, and it's a great way to generate loyalty for an additional 5 minutes per order. It also means they'd actually know if a driver was slacking, or the food had been sat on etc, rather than anonymously losing a customer who wasn't encouraged to give feedback.

Re: Social Media For Small Business: Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse

Dan Thornton — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:13:07 -0000

No problem - and the only other Chinese I've ever ordered from was one whose delivery driver always chatted to use about our plans for the weekend etc - it turned out he was the owner!

Just wish I'd transferred the post I'd written about it to my new domain already to link to - my surprise is pretty obvious.

The big lesson it also reinforced for me is that the idea of personal connections and social promotion should never just be about online marketing - for instance Innocent drinks allow and encourage people to visit their HQ pretty much anytime they like - how many companies would include that alongside their Facebook vanity page?

Re: "Become an online expert" and "generate a nice side-income" (in the clouds maybe)

Dan Thornton — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:15:20 -0000

I'd love for such as expert to come and update my blogs for me so easily, so I could relax, spend more time with my family, and still get the benefits of exchanging knowledge and building my personal reputation online!

There's never an easy way to make lots of money - if there was, we'd all do it, raise the competition, and it would get as hard as anything else...

Re: How Corporates Should View Comment Policies

Dan Thornton — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:48:38 -0000

Good post, and as someone who spent 7 years moderating the forums/chat rooms for motorcyclenews.com amongst others, it's definitely important to set some boundaries if the forum/community is accessible to all ages. A simple swear filter generally catches the most offensive words, for example, and simple reminders work for most people...

But the line on off-topic posts is harder to judge a lot of the time - it's a fine line between keeping things 'on topic' and killing conversations, assuming there's any agreement between the founders and the conversationalists on what 'on topic' constitutes in the first place! For most applications, having an 'on topic' forum, and a 'general' one does a good job of allowing focus, without killing the more general noise a community will want to indulge in.

I'm more worried by the fact Pepsi appears to have imported it's own ToS to apply to the FriendFeed room!

Re: Pepsi Reaches out to Digital People in Analog

Dan Thornton — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:15:32 -0000

I wonder if it was influenced, in any way, by Coke's recent push to drive loyalty via promotional codes?

Re: Guest Post- Twitter- To Converse or to Broadcast-THAT is the Question

Dan Thornton — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:05:12 -0000

I've actually done side by side tests of Twitter accounts for brands, one automated, and one staffed by a real, live human who attempted to engage in conversations.

You can probably guess which one was more popular!

Re: What Is The ROI For Social Media?

Dan Thornton — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:02:56 -0000

Is there not a bit of an elephant in the room, in that a business which is participating in conversation is still doing it to grow business and eventually make money - or it's not actually a business?

Even open source business models are still business models which in some way aim to reward the originators financially to allow them to do what they do?

And there are quantifiable aspects around human conversations - e.g. the amount of them happening. Then it's down to automated/human interpretation to judge the sentiment and value of each one if that's whats required.

I'm a big fan of Katie and Avinash, and the quality and value of conversation are definitely the best metrics of engagement - but you still need to figure out where engagement sits for the rest of the business, and how it's integrated into other areas. If it's contributing to natural search results, for example, then without any measurement of other outcomes, the results are all attributed to SEO work, and engagement is disregarded. If it's driving purchase conversions, but not being tracked, then the natural assumption is that traffic from search, or a bigger display ad etc have driven the end result.

It's easy, when you've involved in social media every day, to assume that it's just a natural thing that everyone gets should be integral to every part of a business, and that quality of conversation in itself should be accepted as result enough - but that's not going to convince anyone who isn't already a convert...

Re: What Is The ROI For Social Media?

Dan Thornton — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:36:14 -0000

No problem. As a Community Marketing Manager, tackling the strategy and tactical implementation of engagement across the portfolio of a 'traditional' magazine,radio,TV and internet company, it's obviously a philosophical and practical dilemma I'm pretty familiar with!

I think on a philosophical level, it's easier to say what we should be doing, but there's a risk that we never join the dots between the philosophical end game (with some case studies), and the practical reality of most companies - this is the area where the biggest challenge occurs.

There's a big responsibility for social media specialists to be able to plan the ideal strategy from the social perspective, the old school perspective, and the transitional perspective, and to somehow juggle the three in a way which educates and transforms business and marketing for the better. The good thing is that the very tools and philosophy we all espouse, which is collaboration etc, is actually a huge asset in doing this!

Re: Bloggers More Influential Than Friends for Purchase Decisions

Dan Thornton — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:21:46 -0000

What's the artificial separation between offline friends, online friends, and people who I know via their blogs, social networks, microblogging etc? I need to check before I can answer!

Re: MTV Brings Back Music Videos With MTVMusic.com

Dan Thornton — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:57:15 -0000

It'd be more amazing if it wasn't for the fact I just get a notice telling me I'm outside of the U.S, therefore the company couldn't be bothered to sort out the copyright legalities yet.

Re: the engaging 'brand'

Dan Thornton — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:43:02 -0000

Yep, and I think a lot of us would have predicted the outcome for levels of interest - I wouldn't be surprised to see him go and do a radio show like Howard Stern's etc...

I'm a big fan of comedians who were deemed offensive at the time - Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks spring straight to mind, and while I think it's fine to apologise to the individuals in this case, nothing more than an apology was due.

Especially when the first time the lady at the centre of the controversy was quoted, it was to say she didn't want to say anything until she'd spoken to her agent!

Re: Mark Evans Launches Twitterrati

Dan Thornton — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:16:47 -0000

Seems like I was ahead of the game when I launched www.140char.com back in April!

It's cool to see some other people writing about similar topics, although seeing Darren Rowse launch with a large number of followers because of his previous work did make me pause for thought having been building up 140char from scratch!

I just hope we don't end up with 100 new blogs all covering the same content, and that everyone in the space can start finding ways to work together to make some interesting and unique content.

Re: A page full of thank yous for some great people | Broadcasting Brain

Dan Thornton — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:21:39 -0000

What a cool thing to do....nice work! And I'm proud if I helped you in any way...

Re: Shut Up- You’re Helping the Customer!

Dan Thornton — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:01:13 -0000

The lesson from this should be that every company, regardless of whether it has a formal social media marketing campaign or not, needs to have clear guidelines on employees communicating via blogs and social networks etc.

I'd suggest somewhere like the BBC guidelines to be a good start.

This is just one example from a company which doubtless has 100 other employees chatting happily on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc.

As I recently said in answer to the question 'Should a brand use social media?', it's a pointless question, because your employees and customers already are.

Re: Why Internet Marketing is Like Driving Supercars

Dan Thornton — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:22:09 -0000

I'd definitely be interested, bearing in mind I'm a blogger, automotive journalist, and work on marketing for some large automotive magazines and websites!

Re: Guest Comment: Why Music Can't 'Just Be Free'

Dan Thornton — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:06:51 -0000

Isn't there one major point to acknowledge? When there is talk about music becoming free, it isn't suggesting that artists shouldn't be reimbursed for their efforts.

It's suggesting that the cost of distribution and retail of a physical product containing music is now replaced by the low cost of electronic distribution, and therefore it might make more sense for artists to use free music as a way to build interest and promote themselves - making the money from merchandise, live events and other mechanisms - e.g. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails etc.

You're also assuming that making something free to obtain means that there won't be different levels of popularity - just because everything is free doesn't mean it's all good. Most website content is free to consume but some sites are a lot more popular than others, due to promotion, recommendation, ranking etc.

And surely Wikipedia, for example, shows people will participate in creation for reasons other than payment. People do it for recognition, personal branding, because they like sharing, because they want to get one over on big industry etc. I put in time and effort on my personal blogs because they have numerous benefits - none of which is financial.

And if the creation of music copyright began 150 years ago - music began a long time earlier! Copyright is a by product of a business model for content creation, not a reason for it's existence.

Re: Guest Comment: Why Music Can't 'Just Be Free'

Dan Thornton — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:47:53 -0000

It's a bit late for last.fm (After CBS bought it), but there are plenty of other options out there which are pretty interesting.

It's interesting to see EMI aiming to start innovating, rather than leaving it to tech companies like Apple, iLike, Last.fm etc.

Re: Gmail Themes. That's Totally Ninja.

Dan Thornton — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:29:54 -0000

I was about to recommend Google Redesigned from GlobexDesigns as well. I've been using it for a couple of months and even had people at work stop as they walked past to ask what it was...

Re: IT Must Learn to Bend or Business Will Break

Dan Thornton — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:45:00 -0000

Funnily enough, I've just blogged about this from a different perspective, quoting RWW's coverage of the Accenture report on employees using technology that isn't approved by company IT.

When employees and customers are all finding their way around the restrictions, the restrictions need to be removed.

Re: Obsessing about new news

Dan Thornton — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:36:47 -0000

I remember the first time I encountered a feed reader, and I still get a lot of my news that way, but for me, Twitter is probably the main channel (I'm still getting into Friendfeed).

It's why I started a blog on microblogging (140char.com), having experienced finding news on Twitter such as Heath Ledger's death, the UK earthquakes, the US and Chinese earthquakes etc before mainstream news channels or my feed list.

And it comes filtered by the relevancy of friend recommendation, which is why I've never really used Digg or Techmeme as much as I could have done for news. It's not the wisdom of crowds I'm after - it's the wisdom of my own crowd...

Re: Jameson Does Pandora Right

Dan Thornton — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:53:00 -0000

As a longtime Irish whiskey drinker, it's good to see Jamesons doing something which is appropriate for the place it's displayed.

Just a shame it's on Pandora, and I'm outside the U.S!