Archive : November 2009

Basheera Khan writes that bookshops should die. Retreating slightly from her panegyric for digital readers, she falls back on the library as the alternative. I doubt that my local library stocks or is able to get hold of even a tiny fraction of the books I have next to my bed. One of her commenters points out that, without a market for book sales, there would be no libraries anyway.

Even without the library argument, I think she’s profoundly wrong.

A book is a guarantee of permanence, and of ownership. There is no DRM baked into the printed word, and nothing stopping me reading a book I own whether I am in the middle of the Sahara or on my sofa. There is nothing stopping me lending it to a friend, and I don’t need to worry whether their reader device supports ePub, or whatever format. Lord Mandleson isn’t going to be around with the heavies if I start using a site like BookCrossing to share unwanted purchases.

I’ve been thinking of how to measure engagement in the digital space for a while now, so I wanted to aggregate my thoughts and put them in one place. This post is intended to be provocative and get people thinking about how the current thinking of measurement of social media should change. It isn’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution – more an articulation of things that people should consider more and more when they embark on work in the online social space.

Assessing necessity

Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.

Back in the summer William and I were invited to take part in a Creative Review round table discussion to debate the ‘Future of Advertising’. Chaired by Patrick Burgoyne, Editor of Creative Review, we were joined by the great and the good from agencies across London.

Over the hour and a half chat the topics we talked about varied from measurement mechanisms for digital campaigns, payment models, client-agency relationships and a load of other stuff.

Hello. I’m Sara and I joined Made by Many last month. My forte is content, so it seems appropriate that my first post should be all about conversation… specifically the two conversations that go with just about every digital project.

Never simple, is it?

The first of these is all about the customers, the people for whom we’re building this product or service. This conversation is pretty user-centric: essentially, what do they need? What are their problems, and how can we help solve — or at least minimise — them?

Typekit launched recently amid a tremendous buzz from designers and bloggers across the web.

What Typekit offers are ‘real’ fonts on the web. Don’t quite know what this means. Surely Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma et al are all ‘real’ fonts. I think what they mean is that there is now access to a huge library of extra fonts to employ in browser-based design beyond the standard set of ‘browser-safe’ fonts.

For those who don’t follow my Twitter stream, I’ve been running a ‘bosewatch‘ hashtag campaign for the last couple of months. You see, my desk overlooks Regent Street and the Bose store is directly opposite. I tweet casual observations about what’s going on there, often passing comment on how empty it looks.

It’s all been a bit tongue-in-cheek. Casual brand stalking if you like. But everything changed at lunchtime today. I got a phone call which began…

We’re really happy to have been nominated as a finalist in the British Interactive Media Association Awards (BIMA) for ‘Best Blog’.

Both rounds of voting are public, so mucho thank-o if you nominated or voted for us in the first round. God bless you.

It feels great to be nominated as one of a very strong field of great blogs, but let’s face it – it would feel sooooo much better to utterly defeat them and win the category. And that’s we need to ask you for yet another favour: please go here and vote for Made by Many to win.

I’ve been collecting the profile pics of people on Twitter who represent themselves with a single eye.

Fine, that’s really normal.

But now, Twitter have made my ‘hobby’ easier with Twitter Lists.

I’ve been able to create a list called ‘eye-avatars’ and I’d be very grateful if you could send me links to more and more ‘eyes’ – I figure we all know an eye-guy or girl.