Digital Shoreditch Festival from Digital Shoreditch on Vimeo.

Check out this teaser for the Digital Shoreditch Festivalthat launches in May. Said to be the voice of everything digital that happens in Shoreditch. The festival opens up the debate on the impact and importance of digital technologies across a wide cross section of industries; nurturing and connecting the digital community; providing a platform to build links and share digital best practice, and positioning Shoreditch firmly at the heart of digital innovation.

The activity culminates on 3rd-7th May, 2011, where Shoreditch will be transformed into a digital playground with late-night parties, open studios, eye-catching displays, lighting up buildings, gigs, conferences, workshops, real-world interactive installations, and augmented reality games.

Whether you are a company or an individual, an expert or an enthusiast, there will be something exciting for you at the festival. The scheduled events feature outstanding creatives and developers, politicians and the press.

The programme is designed to explore and celebrate a vast array of industry areas, encompassing animation, art, marketing, advertising, gaming, web design, television, social media, film, graphics, architecture, product design, mobile and many more.
Heads to digitalshoreditch.com to find out more, follow them @DigiShoreditch and become a fan at facebook.com/Digital-Shoreditch

The Twitter trio took a quirkier, more meandering path to social-media stardom. In 2006, Evan Williams was striking out with Odeo, the startup he’d founded to help people discover and create podcasts. Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes had rendered his idea irrelevant. Trouble was, he still had venture capital funding. Williams encouraged employees to experiment with new ideas, hoping something might stick. Jack Dorsey, a young engineer with a deep understanding of the tech behind taxi-dispatch services, suggested a service called Twttr (the vowels came later) that would let people answer the question “What are you doing?” by text message. The idea resonated, and so, with help from Biz Stone, Odeo’s creative director, Dorsey built a prototype in two weeks. When the company was incorporated a year later, Dorsey, the brains behind the product, became CEO, and Stone was chief creative officer. Williams, who grabbed the title of Twitter chairman, didn’t join Twitter full-time until the spring of 2008.

News publishers are seeing an increasing number of us receiving our news through social media platforms. The Nieman Journalism Lab for big picture crystal ball gazing on the future of journalism says 5-15 per cent of traffic to news websites is coming from social media referrals. This might not be a big percentage now but as more people take to social networks, the trend is on the way up. One US survey showed, 44 per cent of news readers use social networks to share news and information.

The buzz phrase for harnessing the power of social media to bring in the punters is social media optimisation. It is how the news media can adopt strategies to optimise the probability of their content being distributed through social media networks.

It stands to reason that news organisations need to harness this human impulse to share interesting stuff by making it easier for their content to be spread by social media networks. One way to prosper is to lead a reader or viewer’s attention from one story to another. Many news websites are very effective at doing this and other less so. But the trend does represent, as Ken Doctor of Newsonomics puts it, “the social web is the new homepage”.

While many news websites have Facebook and Twitter tabs on webpages to make sharing easy, it’s fair to say traditional news organisations have been patchy in coming to terms with the impact of the internet and how news consumption patterns and habits are changing. More and more news stories we are interested in find us through our social media filters and we also like to participate, to discuss the news online and to share it among our peers.

To increase audiences, news organisations and journalists need to learn to engage with them. Being open to feedback can improve the customer’s experience and grow loyalty to the news brand. One idea is for news organisations to encourage their journalists to use their social networks to bring more readers or viewers to a story and make it easy for them to share it.

Journalists also need training in social media. News rooms need to counter any curmudgeonly resistance by old school thinking because they now need staff adept at using social media to increase the organisation’s ability to engage and promote its news product.

News organisations also have to keep up with future developments. For example, many of us will soon be able to live stream news events from our mobile phones. We can already do it on a peer to peer basis but news from YouTube that it will be rolling out YouTube Live means we are so close to realising live streaming citizen journalism onto open internet platforms that can be viewed by anyone with reasonable access to the internet. How will the traditional news media cope?

In the last decade, we’ve been witnessing a slowly unfolding crash between the news industry and the internet. Now social media has added a high speed element. There are casualties especially in the US where dozens of newspapers have closed and hundreds of journalists have been made unemployed. But if your business is based on news, wouldn’t it be foolish to ignore or minimise an increasing part of the connected and literate world that is using social media to share the news?

Let us know your thoughts below. How do you get the news? Are Twitter, YouTube and Facebook increasingly doing it for you? What media organisations use social media effectively and how are they doing it?

And if you have bright ideas on how news organisations can generate more revenue from giving their news content away for free on the internet, I’m sure they would like to hear from you!

This post was first published by Social Media NZ on 12 April 2011.

A nice feature of the modern social web is that it’s modular. You can plug in and customize pre-made pieces of software (often created by other users or companies), and mix and match what works best for you without a lot of technical know-how. Facebook works the same way with apps.

Many Facebook apps are built for casual use, like the social games and quizzes you may see your friends using in their personal feeds. But there are quite a few apps that are ideal for a business Fan Page. These are useful for customizing your page with greater detail, showcasing your content from other social sites and getting more information from your customers. Here are five essential Facebook apps that your business may want to take for a spin.

1. Static FBML for Your Page Sidebar

We’ve already discussed how the Static FBML app can be used to make your Fan Page a unique destination. But this versatile plugin can also bring some interactivity to the column that appears on the left-hand side of your page.

Vertical, left-hand navigation is something users expect to find on most websites. They will be comfortable looking there for additional links, promotions and contact details. Moving a Static FBML box over to the left-hand column is a great way to exploit this valuable real estate. Here’s how to do it.

If you haven’t already done so, add the app to your Fan Page and make sure it’s functioning as a “Box” rather than a “Tab.” Add content to your box using standard HTML. Graphics cannot be uploaded to Facebook here, so you must reference them from a URL — likely one on your own hosted website or blog.

For a sidebar, think about adding some clean graphic buttons or icons that link out to other destinations your fans would be interested in, such as your company website, blog or Twitter account. This sidebar will be visible no matter what Fan Page tab your visitors are on, so consider using graphic elements that coincide with your existing logo and color scheme.

Once your content is added and saved, it will appear as a box on the “Boxes” tab. Head over there to ensure that your HTML has rendered properly. If so, click the “Pencil” in the top-right corner of the box and select “Move To Wall Tab.” This will display your content in the left-hand navigation of your page.

2. Promotions

Contests and giveaways are a great way to engage people with your brand, especially on the social web. A chance at some free stuff is one of the top reasons people follow and friend brands in the first place. The Promotions app makes it easy to build and publish a contest on Facebook in a way that is inherently social and shareable.

Promotions is different from many Facebook apps in that the content you create for it lives on the developer’s website. This makes it a versatile tool, but you’ll have to sign up for a free account at wildfireapp.com.

Once you create an account and connect the registered app to Facebook, the promotions you generate on WildFire will populate the tab on your Fan Page. Promotions are easily built through a step-by-step process. Provide the dates of the contest, the types of prizes, the fields for the entry form, specific parameters about contest entry and rules, and upload any additional artwork you want to include.

A nice advantage of having contest data centralized on WildFire is that it can be sourced out to other social networks, and even to your own company website. Any changes or additions you make to your promotions will dynamically update on all of the locations where your customers and fans find you on the web.

Note, the cost to publish a basic promotional campaign through Wildfire is $5, plus $.99 for each day the campaign is active. Additional packages with more customization and publishing options are available.

3. Social RSS

If you already have great content from your company’s blog or another social network that you’d like to bring to the fore of your Facebook presence, Social RSS is a smart tool.

You can configure this app to automatically pull in updates from any RSS or ATOM feed and display them as posts on your Fan Page, either on a dedicated tab, a wall tab (on the left side) or as part of your core news feed. It’s a useful way to automate your content and eliminate the need to republish things manually to your Facebook Page.

Take note, however, that fans on social networks are much more responsive to curated content. Especially on Facebook, where people connect to a smaller community of personal friends and family, an unfiltered pipeline of RSS content may not be welcome in all news feeds. If your core customers are already subscribed to your blog and other social accounts, a double-dose of the same exact content may trigger some to hide your updates or “un-fan” you. Consider relegating your Social RSS feed to a tab if this is the case.

Test where and how an app like Social RSS is best implemented on Facebook, and adjust as needed depending on the size and response of your audience.

4. Poll

Sometimes you just need a little feedback. That’s what social engagement is all about, right?

On Facebook, it doesn’t get any simpler than the Poll app. There’s no account to sign up for. Once you connect it to your Page, all the setup and data lives right in your settings panel.

A poll can be a casual way to get a read from your fans about a new product, a new page design, or your business in general.

In the poll settings, simply name your burning question (What do you think of our new spicy burritos?), list your choices (Delicious, Pretty Tasty, Needs Work, Offensive) and select your publishing options.

Polls can be published to your Page wall/feed, live on a custom tab or be popped into your left-hand navigation where visitors can click anytime they come to your Page. You can invite your friends to take a poll, and they can easily share it out as they would any other post or app. Both you and your visitors can see the poll results without leaving Facebook.

Publishing a weekly poll about new products or changes in your industry is a great way to keep fans coming back to your Page and talking about your brand.

Cited from Matt Silverman at mashable.com

A great deal of successful marketing today depends on closely understanding consumer behavior. As a marketer, you may always be curious to understand what excites or motivates your customers into buying either your products or those of your competitor. Depending on the buying and consumption cycle of your product, there can be several factors that will determine the sales conversion ratio for your product.

Toward Right Learning

A successful sale happens when your customer understands his need and is convinced that your product can satisfy that need in a reliable way. Both these steps happen through a process, which is known as learning. Hence as a marketer, your job begins by ensuring that the customer perceives his need and, more importantly, finds the solution in your product.

Right Learning and Right Conversations

At this very moment, you may be reading this article on your laptop or desktop. Remember the day when you had decided to buy your first computer. You must have considered many factors before finalizing which computer to purchase. One of the important decision points for a buyer is his circle of reference. It is natural for you, as a buyer, to discuss with your informed friends about the best brand. Positive references from friends and acquaintances help one make a decision.

How has Facebook changed all of this?

Research has shown that buyers do a great deal of product research on the Internet and most of the time choose to purchase the product either online or offline. The power of the Internet as a research and information resource has been realized to a great extent by customers worldwide.

The basics of consumer behavior, learning, reference groups, and buying decisions have remained exactly the same. But what has changed significantly is the speed with which everything happens. Technology has brought down the barriers in global communication. Social networking sites, and more importantly the rising popularity of Facebook, bears a strong testimony to the growing power of the Internet as a mode of communication and a source of information.

Before and After Facebook

Like we discussed, most of the learning before the proliferation of Facebook and social media happened through advertisements on television. During the days of conventional media dominance, marketing was driven by the power to broadcast. Marketing communication was primarily unidirectional through blaring advertisements and press releases. Word of mouth happened on a one-on-one basis, where the conversation would begin and end around a small group of people.

Today, a search on your favorite brand on Facebook may reveal many conversations about the brand, which may depict user’s positive or negative experiences with the brand. Unlike the clandestine brand gossip of earlier days, the Facebook era ensures that conversations are documented and made easily available through social networking sites.

Brands trying to ignore this new medium find themselves in a state similar to an ostrich, with its head buried in sand, thinking the world cannot see it. The real image of the brand in people’s minds shows up aloud these days through conversations on Facebook.

Facebook and Online Reputation

The power of Facebook, as discussed, has extended the scope of Word of Mouth beyond the good old conversation between friends. Today, each and every Facebook user is free to publish his views on your brand. The true effect of this happens whenever these conversations appear in searches and influence people’s opinion about the brand image.

This is where online reputation, primarily on a widely accepted medium like Facebook, matters.

In a nutshell..
Managing a positive image of your brand requires you to expand your reach, more than what you would do in case of conventional media. The conversational nature of social networking sites, such as Facebook, demands a different approach. Unlike one-time broadcast by the conventional medium, Facebook stores each and every conversation and makes it available through the search option for anyone who is curious to know more about your brand.

That is the reason why it is a critical part of any brand plan to feature positively on social networking sites, such as Facebook. Engaging consultants who have experience in managing brands through the new era of social networks is a growing practice that can help brands manage the new wave.

Facebook’s advertising platform is a vehicle worth exploring. The tool allows you to place small display type ads in the right sidebar of Facebook pages and profiles. At this point it’s not as effective in pure response as well targeted Google AdWords campaigns, but it’s not really the same kind of vehicle and you won’t find AdWords in Facebook, at least for now.

Like many things Facebook, setting up and running successful campaigns isn’t as straightforward as it could be. Below is a description of five steps to consider as you explore Facebook advertising. (Bookmark the Facebook Ad Help Center and return to get answers to the Facebook Ads process)

Target

One of the best things about Facebook advertising is the ability select who sees your ad using a number of variables, including keywords. You can target by geography, age, gender, education, relationship status, workplace and keywords. (I know someone who wanted to send a birthday message to his wife and targeted so narrowly that she was the only who would see the ad.) Demographics are pretty straightforward, the real trick is expanding your keywords to the point where you have a large enough audience to get the job done. Facebook used to have a tool that let you search for the hottest topics being discussed but they shelved it as they build a more robust analytics package. Check out all of your targeting options here

Attract and Engage

The first thing you must do is decide whether you want people to be directed to your own web page or something on Facebook like a Page, Application, Group or Event. If you are already the administrator of your Facebook Page, Group, Event, or Application, you can select it from the drop down option. The thing that’s nice about using ads to promote your pages and events is that Facebook puts a “Become a fan” or “RSVP to this event” button right in the ad. People don’t even have to visit your page to take action. There are some pros to sending them to a link on your web site (better tracking options) but by sending them to assets on Facebook you have the ability to multiply their actions through the natural social wall activity that occurs when someone RSVPs to an event. (All their followers automatically see that action.)

Some users find Facebook ads a good tool to promote events or get new fans to the pages. From an engagement standpoint think in terms of using the ads to promote content and value and not so much to sell something. The most successful use of ads on social networks is to create deeper engagement so you have the ability to sell once trust is built. Think about putting white papers on your Fan Pages and promoting that content or creating a free event, like a webinar, and advertising that event. In both of these cases you’ll have the opportunity to sell a bit once you’ve proven you know your stuff. (One quirk of note – when you promote an event created with the Facebook event app the title of the ad will automatically default to the title of the event, so name your event wisely )

You don’t get much space in these ads so use it wisely. Your headline (25 characters) should grab attention immediately with a benefit. You’ll get another 135 characters to describe and entice in the body of the ad. You also have the option to upload an image. Take this option. It may be the most important aspect of your ad so choose wisely. Facebook users are very image driven (it’s the largest photo sharing site in the world) and the visual graphic you choose will make or break an ad. This is an element you must plan on testing (see below)

Budget

Facebook advertising works a bit like AdWords in that you bid for keywords and compete to get your ads shown. How effective you are at this depends upon the competitiveness of your keywords. You can choose between a cost per click (CPC) model where you pay only for clicks or a cost per thousand (CPM) model where you pay per 1000 ad views. Most research I’ve read suggests that the CPC model is slightly more effective in terms of ROI. (Here’s a nice Glossary of Facebook Ads terminology in case this is starting sound buzz wordy.)

To start your campaign you must determine a bid per click and daily budget. You can set both of these numbers very low, but don’t expect much. Initially you are just testing so you’ll want to set your click bid somewhere around the Facebook suggested amount and a daily budget you can live with, something like $50 or more to start. You can always adjust these. Learn about the Facebook Ads Manager here.

Test

No matter where or what you should always test your advertising. Online applications like this make it pretty darn simple. You can and should create multiple ad versions. Once you create an ad you will have the ability to create similar ads and run those as well. You’ll be able to easily view which ad is performing the best based on clicks. Facebook does need to approve your ads so make sure you are familiar with their guidelines.

The simplest thing to test is your image. I’ve seen ads go from no response to mega response with a better picture. Mind you I had no idea it was a better picture or I would have used it in the first place, but testing told me so. Here are some suggestions from Facebook on improving your ads.

Analyze

Once you create and launch your campaigns you need to start tracking and tweaking. Facebook has a tool that gives you some information on actions taken inside the Facebook platform. So, if you are running an ad for an event or Facebook page you can use the Facebook Insights tool to monitor interaction.

Facebook Insights is a nice reporting tool as it can give you information about the actual, not targeted demographics and interests of the people clicking on your ads and keywords that drew that interest. This will help you narrow or broaden your targeting. Page admins can access Insights by logging in and viewing the box titled Insights in the left sidebar. This is only visible to Page admins. If you click on See All you will get full reporting. More information on Insights here and from the very useful blog Inside Facebook.

Facebook does allow you to run ads that point people links outside of Facebook and in order to track these ads you simply and monitor them using your own analytics tool such as Google Analytics. If you are using Google Analytics simply use the URL builder tool in Analytics to create a link to your page that contains tracking parameters and place that in your Facebook Ad as

The important point about Rich user experiences is the development of a webpage in a way to facilitate the needs of the users. Before web 2.0 the websites were just a way to delivery information. Those sites didn’t allow the user to insert comments or participate in the content in any way.

A good example of this is the Wikipedia which is a website made to delivery information but at the same time allow the users to update the information displayed there. This functionality of the Wikipedia is what makes the website works in the way it does today. Without the user participation it would be technically impossible to collect the huge amount of information that the Wikipedia offer.

Another point of the pattern of this week is the merging of web application and desktop applications. This is happening I think mostly because the growing of the broadband internet and also the large amount of people using the internet. So more people using internet and in a faster speed makes the developers to think about this when develop an application.

Today is very easy and low cost to sell products using the Internet. The decision of a business to put their products online doesn’t start with the high cost anymore. The large amount of free software and also the easy access to those tools is helping today to change the way of the online business.

E-commerce today is more based on find simple solution to sell products rather than sophisticate portal. With the constant growing of user, the companies who adventure to sell products online are looking to find easy to use solutions to the user. While a physical store cares about the modernity of how the place looks like on the internet this is the opposite. On Internet a simple and clean environment is what companies seek to sell their products.

There are many e-commerce solutions that you can find on the net. I just took one to exemplify how easy it is to sell products over the Internet. The CPC E-commence is a powerful php shopping cart and website builder application. It was designed from a market perspective. With this software provides everything that someone needs to create and manage an online storefront. You can use this since the stage to build the website from the scratch till the development of the ecommerce application. The user can create shopping cart, drive the traffic of the store, merchandise the products and manage costumers and orders.

When you look at the top, you can see they are many documents in digital forms being uploaded from many users. They actually want their documents or articles to be read by other users.. Some articles are for professionals but some documents are for entertainment such as humour, games info and so on…You can see the author recent activity on the right sidebar and DOC has provided a tutorial how we can use this Docshare… All documents can be categorised as u can see on the black toolbars in the picture such as businness and legal. ebooks, essays and Guides and instruction.. So its easy for the user to find the document just clicking in any categories the document they want to find may fall into. I have use it  to upload any of my old document so that i can easily find them in the future maybe it might be needed and Docshare is my storage location as well…Try it! it can be easily embedded onto your website as well… Really amazing tool to be explored.

Delicious actually has a lot benefits. Some of them:

Let say if someone stole our things and we want the insurance company to pay for those item but they need exact items list, how are we going to list every single items we hav had.. But with Delicious-library, its quite easy to do that… as i mentioned it will keep all our stuffs so that it might be useable if something happen in the future as a platform not only for inventory,  but can become sorts of catalogs or we can even sell things from here… since it is represented products to our customers or friends…

As the blog DELICIOUS MONSTER refers to how it can be used for Loan books, I was thinking that this tool can be useful as propose tools for QUT library but as I read the article again, I guess it only suits for individual used.. Let say If i loan a book from the QUT library and the due date is on 23 december, so on the due date, Delicious library will shows pop up to remind me about loan due date.. If QUT library used this tools as there are thousands of students to loan the book and every single user, this tool will pops out everyones loan due date, this will be painful isnt it… Yeah but for sure I really like this delicious-library 2.0.. It allows us to download and try it! if u like it, u can purchase the from the blog it self.. It will be useful and fun… What u guys think?