My session was titled “Social Media for Business – What Works, What Doesn’t”, which is about as vague as it gets: above all I was keen to not feed the social media hype machine (i.e. no videos featuring soundtracks by Fatboy Slim), and wanted to get across the twin messages of matching the right tools with core business objectives, and keeping measurement to the fore of your thinking at all times.

The slides I used in my presentation that evening are available over on the EI Best Connected blog, but I wanted to gather up all the videos from the sessions in one place as well. I was interviewed by the charming Dorte for two of the clips (the third seems to have disappeared) – Dorte is off getting to know the new addition to her family at the moment, hope all is well!

My hopes to get the dissertation published were probably overly-ambitious: I certainly didn’t have the resources to re-work it into shape for an academic journal, and work deadlines kept pushing thoughts of publication in the business press into the never-never. So, rather than have it languish forever on a hard-drive, I’m publishing it here, in full, warts and all.

The dissertation was an examination of the use of Social Media Marketing (SMM) by Irish SMEs. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved with it, and I still think it has a lot of value. Looking back at it, I think my biggest take-away was the natural fit between the ways in which the majority of SMEs tend to carry out their marketing activities (heavily dependent on networks, and the personality of the owner-manager), and what is seen to be “best practice” SMM – a moving target if ever there was one!

A massive thank you once again to everyone who gave their time in support of this.

I also believe that there is no “correct” way to use LinkedIn: while it’s pretty clear that LinkedIn exists as a tool to help create and develop relationships between individuals, it’s not prescriptive about the nature of those relationships, or about who you do or don’t try and connect with (LinkedIn does certainly try to be prescriptive, but it largely fails to do so). Humans aren’t so big on specialisation (leave that to the insects): we’re very good at adapting tools for our own purposes, and I think this is particularly evident in the way people use social media today.  It’s my opinion that your use of LinkedIn should reflect the way you build professional relationships offline.

For my own part, I place most value on the strength and integrity of the relationships in my immediate network, i.e. those users who I’m directly connected with. I know people in my network well (some more so than others), but to a greater or lesser extent, have a good handle on what they’re passionate about, and what areas their capabilities lie in. Because of this I can help bring people in my network together where I think it’s beneficial to do so. It also means that if someone in my network asks me to introduce them to someone else in my network, I can do so with a reasonable level of assurance that they’re not a crazed nut-job, or even worse, merely trying to sell them something.

Not everyone uses LinkedIn this way. For some people, LinkedIn is a numbers game, whether it be for ego or to help them open doors: more power to them (and no judgement!), but it’s not for me. I’ve been using a standard boilerplate response to connection requests that I’m not accepting, as per below:

Hi <name>,

Many thanks for your invitation to connect on LinkedIn. I’m afraid I’m going to have to turn down the offer at this time, as I have a rule that I only connect with people I’ve had some previous interaction with outside of LinkedIn – we’ve met at a conference, talked on the phone, chatted on Twitter, etc. – or have come to me with a recommendation from an existing connection. This means that if someone is looking for an introduction to one of my connections, I’ve some basis upon which to make the recommendation, which in turn helps keep a high level of trust in my network.

This doesn’t mean I’m looking to end all communication between us – if there is something in particular you were looking to contact me about drop me an email to <work_email>.

I hope you understand and appreciate my position on this.

Kind regards, David

I’ve been using this template response for a number of months now, and I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations arise out of it – in fact, some of these conversations have formed the basis of new connections, which developed as the rights and wrongs of my position were argued back and forth. Some people never get back to me, most people are broadly accepting of my position, and a small number of people seem to take offence at my decision, which I have to say, baffles me completely. I readily confess that I haven’t always used LinkedIn this way: there’s definitely some people that I connected with when I first began using it that I had never met before, but I think at this stage I have met most of these people.

Interested to hear what others make of this, or how you manage your connections on LinkedIn. I’d also like to make it unambiguously clear that the contents of this post and my general position on using LinkedIn do not in any way represent the views or policy of my employer.

I’ll start with photos, as it’s the most straightforward. I use a Canon A720IS, which I bought back in 2008. It’s served me well, and I have zero complaints about it. For editing I use Picasa from Google (without a doubt the worst collection of code to have ever escaped from Mountain View). It serves it’s purpose (the limit of my post-processing is hitting the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button), and I stick with it primarily because of the support for Google Web Albums. All the photos taken with the Canon get uploaded here, and I breezed past the free 1GB account Google gives you a long while back. Very early on I decided to pay for additional storage: I currently pay$20 per annum for an extra 80GB, and consider it money well spent for the peace of mind it brings in terms of long-term storage. I have an inherent distrust of hardware for self-storage, having broken too many external HDDs over the years, so I’m happy to throw my media into the Cloud – presuming the price is right.

Video next and it’s a big ‘un. I shoot the majority of my video on a JVC Everio GZ-MG130, which shoots decent quality clips, but formats them in the most bizarre way. Clips are saved as .MOD, which is just MPEG2 with some timestamp and aspect ratio info stuck into an accompanying .MOI file. VLC plays MOD files without the MOI present, so not sure if they’re all that necessary. I back up everything directly from the camera’s HDD to Amazon S3, using a superb little piece of software called JungleDisk. JungleDisk allows you to read and write any files directly to your S3 account, as if it were a drive on your computer or local network – I’ve used the Windows and Linux versions and have had no problems with either. You pay a one-off fee to JungleDisk, and then Amazon bill you directly for storage space and transport costs, on a per-GB basis: I’m currently paying between $4-$5 per month to store every piece of video I’ve shot on the Everio since 2008, which is a pretty good deal. This is my “insurance” – I don’t watch or share any of the videos using S3 (too expensive), I just know it’s there in case I lose the other copies of the videos. I have no faith in the durability and longevity of DVDs, which is I why I don’t use the Everio’s built-in DVD creator function.

So backup is easy, watching is hard. As I mentioned, VLC will play the MOD files, but I want to be able to watch the movies on my TV. I have a Memup media-box, but it’s pretty limited with the formats it supports (and firmware updates seem non-existent), so the MOD files need to be converted to a format it handles before I can watch them. I use Avidemux for this – it seems to be the best of the free open-source video editors/converters, but the interface is definitely for the advanced user – there’s a definite lack of a “Start Here!” button :) It took a lot of trial-and-error, but the process of converting the MOD files to watch them on the Memup is very simple: as per the screenshot, set the Video and Audio options to ‘Copy’, and the Format option to ‘MPEG-PS (A+V)’.

This seems to be the simplest way to just get the stupid files to play – there’s little or no compression involved, so it’ll presumably eat disk space quite quickly. However, it works, and I’ll leave well enough alone for the moment, as it took too long to get it working in the first place!

I’ve come across a bit of stumbling block recently though (sigh): the Everio went on the blink from Jan-June of this year (mysteriously resolved itself, so not going to dig any deeper), and I shot a lot of video using the Canon. The Canon stores video clips as MJPG, which I cannot manage to get working in any way, shape or form on the Memup, and I can’t seem to convert it to an intermediate format using Avidemux either (it doesn’t seem to like how the audio is encoded). I’ve run out of patience with the Memup at this point, so I’m taking a new approach. I’ve been toying with the idea of hacking my Nintendo Wii for a while now, and this problem with the Memup and MJPG files has given me a great excuse to give it a go. The plan is to use the BannerBomb hack to add the Homebrew Channel, and then hopefully play the MJPG natively using a Homebrew app (worst comes to worst, I’ll write one myself if I have to :). I’m just waiting for an SD card adapter to arrive in the post and I can get started – I’ll put up another post detailing the steps when I’ve had a crack at it: and whether or not the whole high-falutin’ scheme actually worked…

As an aside: thinking about all the various places online that I store memories raises some interesting questions with regard to accessing the services in the case of death: if I pop my clogs I don’t imagine that Amazon will be promptly handing over my S3 login credentials to my wife. It’ll be interesting to see if someone starts offering some type of managed service around this, some sort of online ‘Will and Testament’ for multimedia – or does one already exist?

You should follow my newly-created @ei_dscanlon account for general #entirl related news, as well as stuff related to the Web, tech things, online marketing – in short, anything that’s related to the day job. The existing @dscanlon account will mostly consist of Foursquare check-ins :) Why am I maintaining two separate accounts? While I’m aware that it’s impossible to cleanly divide the professional from the personal online, there will be updates from my @dscanlon account that don’t add any value to the #entirl brand – and considering that I update Twitter during working hours I think it’s only fair that I keep those updates out of the @ei_dscanlon stream.

I will still most definitely be engaging in conversations regarding the Web and technology using the @dscanlon account, but increasingly I’ll use it to discuss other issues that interest me as well. I still haven’t exactly worked out a model for who I should follow using which account, but I’m sure it’ll all come out in the wash. Or, trying to manage two accounts could prove to be too much of an overhead, and fails miserably. Interesting to see which way it goes!

Why am I doing this? Not entirely sure – I have some vague notion of using the lexicon to create poetry, but I write worse poems than a Vogon so that probably won’t fly. Maybe I’ll create a contest, award a prize to the most beautiful piece created using or inspired by the collection. Either way, it’s a hobby :)

Thanks to Gavin Wray for the tip on using Vodpod to generate the slideshow above, it’s ridiculous that WordPress choose not to let you embed Flickr sets directly – shame on you guys!

• You can’t use the same email address to register multiple accounts. Fairly obvious I guess, but you never know unless you give it a try :)

• Facebook doesn’t allow the email address you register with to contain the plus symbol (+), even though it’s a valid character for the local-part of an email address (Dominic Sayers tells you why here, plus he provides a nifty RFC-compliant validator). Why is that important? If, like me, you find yourself registering multiple accounts with a website like Facebook or Twitter, it’s impractical to have to create new email addresses for each account. If you have a Gmail account, you can take advantage of the way they handle the plus symbol to create the appearance of multiple email addresses based on the one account. This is because Gmail essentially sees the addresses myname@gmail.com and myname+randomtext@gmail.com as one and the same, effectively ignoring everything after the plus symbol (actually, they go one step further and auto-label any incoming email with the text after the plus, which is nice). The upshot of this is that you can use the one Gmail account to register for multiple accounts on a site, such as Twitter. I use my primary address, followed by the plus, then add a string describing the account. No matter how many of these ‘fake’ addresses you use, Gmail will keep sending the emails to the ‘primary’ inbox. This is massively useful, but, as I mentioned, Facebook don’t allow it. What gives Facebook?

• They also have some really odd rules about the first names and surnames they consider acceptable. For example, you can only have a maximum of two capital letters in your surname. Which sucks if your surname is McCarthy-Smith or O’Connell-Jones. If LinkedIn allows these names, why not Facebook as well? Why these arbitrary rules? Are Facebook setting themselves up as some kind of surname authority? Feels like lazy coding to me.  On a side note, you also can’t register if your firstname happens to be ‘facebook’ or ‘microsoft’. ‘ebay’ is allowed, alongside a certain c-word coined by an outrageous Corkonian.

So there you go – three things you may possibly already have known about Facebook, but which I didn’t up until this point :)

P.S. I still haven’t actually got around to registering that dummy account… #mefail

As part of my new role I’ve been gathering together a list of all the various Social Media projects that EI is involved with, and identifying a key contact for each. Part of the portfolio includes our Company Profile on LinkedIn – the Profiles are auto-generated from a feed LinkedIn gets from BusinessWeek, and there is also an option to edit a limited set of the information. The Company Profile is a vital piece of marketing real-estate: for some companies (particularly start-ups) it might be the first interaction they have with a potential business partner or buyer, so it’s important that it accurately reflects a company’s image.

According to the LinkedIn Customer Service Center, anyone with a valid company email address (how is this decided?) and a current role at the company has access to update the Company Profile. I was surprised by this, and presuming that there must be some mechanism to lock down access to editing the Profile, dropped LinkedIn customer support an email asking them. I mailed them on a Friday, and with no response by the following Tuesday, gave them a little kick (and a sly dig). They replied late Tuesday evening, and pretty much told me what I had already read at the LinkedIn Customer Service Center. I wrote back expressing my disappointment, and queried whether they intended to even introduce some some of alerting system, an email alert or RSS feed that would let you know when the information had changed. I was thanked for my suggestion, and they further recommended that I subscribe to the LinkedIn Corporate Blog so that I would know if they ever implemented my ideas.

It’s not a huge issue (there’s a list as long as you’re arm of other gripes people have with the LinkedIn UX over here), but it’s a reasonable enough request for someone to be able to have some measure of control over information pertaining to their company: failing that, getting the heads-up that someone may have changed the information.  LinkedIn don’t appear to have a great reputation for listening to customer feedback, and they certainly weren’t jumping out of the blocks to respond to my query either. They’re obviously the dominant player in the sphere of professional social networking at the moment, but there are plenty of new start-ups (here’s two based in Ireland: Weedle and LoopThing) looking to take a piece of the pie if they don’t keep their existing customers happy. Adding new apps and an API is all well and good, but if you stop listening to your customers, they’ll stop talking to you.