Check out my Website!

Partly as a result of the MSc New Media module hosted by Richard Bailey, I have started my own website: www.mackintosholiver.co.uk. The aim is to be able to market myself as an interim manager and also to possibly pick up some consultancy work.

The website was designed by BT as I simply dont have the expertise to create the site myself. I will get a tutorial on how to update the information and add pages so it’s all quite exciting! I am very aware that the website isnt as interactive as a true ‘Web 2.0′ site should aim to be – so I would appreciate suggestions for how to improve it!

I have added a link to this Blog – which I hope wont put prospective employers off!!!

So help and suggestions please!

Spooks and Politics

Tom Steinberg today on the BBC Politics Show gives links to 5 good sites which you Public Affairs wonks will find interesting!

Andrew Neil also has a daily blog about his show which is useful and you can subscribe to a daily e-mail update from him.

Go on – register – you know you can resist!

…I am still in a state of shock with Adam Carter getting blown up by terrorists in last night’s Spooks! What can the world be coming to when TV characters get killed off??!! Do you think if we start a Wispa-style campaign we can get Adam re-incarnated????

New Media and the 2008 PR Week Awards

It is really interesting to look at the influence of the new media on the Campaign of the Year and some of the category winners and commended campaigns in the PR Week Awards 2008. Good learning for us!!

The Campaign of the Year was ‘Bring Back Wispa‘ led by the PR Agency Borkowski and working with the Cadbury in house team. The campaign also won the Digital Innovation award sponsored by Fleishmans. The award suggests that fans of Wispa (which stopped being produced in the UK) started a campaign on Facebook to have the chocolate bar brought back. The agency and in-house team encouraged the facebook campaign and publicised it in the lead up to the announcement in August this year that the bar was being brought back. The Award brochure says that following the announcement there were 25,000 members of 400 Facebook groups and 60,000 people visiting the Wispa website. Danny Rogers, Editor of PR Week said “Cadburt’s Wispa campaign stands out because it expertly harnessed social media to great sales effect. Brilliantly executed.”

Another winner using new media was the campaign: Friends, Join Us for a Drink – Laphroaig Whisky. Markettiers4dc created a web TV show to engage with the online community ‘Friends of Laphroaig’. They came up with the rather unusual idea of a Virtual Whisky Tasting using a Question Time format. More than 7,000 people watched the broadcast internationally! Apparently afficionados in New Zealand were watching the broadcast in the early hours of the morning! The on-line sales targets were met within 5 hours of the transmission. As the limited edition whisky being promoted retailed at £500 a bottle the brand are now big fans of web TV!

One Highly Commended campaign in the specialist and technique category was for The Davos Question from the World Economic Forum. The Forum used YouTube  to create athe first global video conversation between the public and the world leaders participating. More than eight million people took part! Shimon Peres, Henry Kissinger and Bono recorded messages.

Language of the Digital Age

Is it just me (surely not)! – but I must admit that i find the language used to describe new technologies, new media and the whole ‘Digital Age’ thing really impenetrable.

I had a look today at the BERR website www.berr.gov.uk (Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) to find out about what Government was doing to support small businesses through the Credit Crunch. I couldnt find anything, as Peter Mandelson has still to make his announcement about free Health Checks for businesses, but I did spot an earlier release this month http://nds.coi.gov.uk/environment/fullDetail.asp?ReleaseID=381573&NewsAreaID=2&NavigatedFromDepartment=True about Digital Britain. Great stuff, I thought, until I read it!!  So what does this mean:

“Universal access to high quality, public service content through appropriate mechanisms for a converged digital age.”

The release is littered with grand words and phrases – but surely it should mean something to Joe Public aka Joe The Plumber?

End of rant! 

Cyber intimacy or Cyber-solitude?

At our MSC Communications module at Leeds Met www.leedsmet.ac.uk this weekend, we were looking at ‘new media’. Some of the group very sceptical about the social media such as FaceBook and BeBo with people communication with groups of ‘friends’ remotely. One expressed concern that young people in her team had included her in their FaceBook group, but then posted potentially inappropriate photographs of themselves. Another was concerned that people were spending less time actually socialising with ‘real people’ becuase they were interacting on the social media groups.

There was also a programme today (19 ) October, on BBC1 which expressed concerns about the ‘dark side’ on social sites where people hadnt adequately protected their identity.

Sherry Turtle, Professor of Social Studies and Technolgy at MIT. She has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis and culture and on the “subjective side” of people’s relationships with technology, especially computers. She is engaged in active study of robots, digital pets, and simulated creatures, particularly those designed for children and the elderly as well as in a study of mobile cellular technologies. She writes that “…in the future we’re going to be offered technolgoy that promises to make us closer to people – cyber intimacy – butthat actually leaves us in cyber-solitude. Facebook, texting and instant messaging are very seductive….but we’re hiding ourselves and its replacing intimacy.” (The Independent, Visionaries supplement, 18 October 2008, p14.)

Interesting stuff! What do you think?

Imagining the new Internet?

In The Independent supplement on “Visionaries” (18 September 2008), there is an article by Rhodri Marsden and Clare Rudebeck on “Imagining the new internet” http://www.independent.co.uk/dayinapage/2008/October/18  (I couldnt find the supplement sponsored by SAAB on the website – apologies)! As well as confirming the history/evolution of the internet outlined by Richard Bailey http://prstudies.typepad.com/ during his lecture at Leeds Met yesterday http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/coursehandbooks/rso/downloads/MSc_Corporate_Communications_200809.pdf

the supplement also proposed new internet visionaries:

• Dave Clark: Chairman of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board
• John Gilmore: one of the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
• Steve Jobs: CEO Apple Inc
• Mike Jensen: expert in implementation of internet facilities across the developing world
• Nova Spivak: co-founder of earthweb.com and twine.com
• Sebastian Thrun: Stanford professor of robotics.

There were also quotes from “leading thinkers” including David Gauntlett, Professor of Media & Communications at the University of Westminster and creator of mediastudies website www.theory.org.uk. He hopes that the new uses of the internet – the Web 2.0 – will “give individuals the opportunity to create, collaborate, and share ideas I see the making-and-sharing cultures now emerging online as part of a broader shift towards a revitalised, creative culture, where people do not hust sit back and hear about the world, but lean into it and try to make things anew”. I was very pleased to see a communications professor quoted in a supplement on visionaries – great stuff! Go, David, go!