At the start of the year I like to assess where we are going, set out our aims for the coming year, and put in place the mechanisms to help us achieve them. Over the past couple of months we've been exploring how useful social media is to online businesses - both our own and our clients, to ensure we're making the best use of it to benefit us all.
As a part of this we've been attending something called Twunch on a monthly basis. A Twunch is a Twitter lunch, at least that's how it began, with a small group of us exploring our knowledge of Twitter and how we can best utilise it. From there Twunch has grown a little to encompass other aspects of social media, and will in time cover Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and any others we find.
Our initial group has been Twunch_SL (for South Lakeland) but we now feel it's time to spread our wings a little and see how much interest there might be in Twunch in the Burton & Holme areas. The idea is to meet for a 2 hour lunch one day per month, say 12 noon - 2pm, at a central location. This could be the memorial hall or the pub, etc. and the host provides soup, bread & cake, Twunch provides technical support, and everyone who goes along pays £5 to cover the costs of lunch etc. The group size needs to be no more than 10 people initially. If anyone's interested in getting involved, please contact Anne via Twitter on @AstarteWebDes or use one of the contacts here: http://www.yobunny.co.uk/astarte/
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Friday, 29 July 2011
"Can you make a Freedom of Information request via Twitter?"
I spotted an interesting question on another blog today, "Can you make a Freedom of Information request via Twitter?" and my immediate thought was, "No, don't be daft!" but then I read through the said article, you can find it here http://pigsonthewing.org.uk/freedom-of-information-twitter/ by local government website pioneer, Andy Mabbett, and realised I was wrong!
So should an FoI request be submitted via Twitter or Facebook or any other form of social media? You might think, as I did, that such channels aren't serious enough to be used for a formal request, but according to Andy's post linked above you'd be wrong too!
If an organisation has an official channel such as a Twitter account or a Facebook page then, by dint of its being there, it should be properly monitored and replied to by the organisation which owns it. Furthermore, anything on that channel should reflect the organisation's policy and attitude, so it's important to ensure that whoever is responding on behalf of an organisation is both authorised and qualified to do so, or the organisation might find itself in hot water if they get it wrong. So don't leave it to the office junior!!!
So should an FoI request be submitted via Twitter or Facebook or any other form of social media? You might think, as I did, that such channels aren't serious enough to be used for a formal request, but according to Andy's post linked above you'd be wrong too!
If an organisation has an official channel such as a Twitter account or a Facebook page then, by dint of its being there, it should be properly monitored and replied to by the organisation which owns it. Furthermore, anything on that channel should reflect the organisation's policy and attitude, so it's important to ensure that whoever is responding on behalf of an organisation is both authorised and qualified to do so, or the organisation might find itself in hot water if they get it wrong. So don't leave it to the office junior!!!
Saturday, 2 April 2011
To interact or not to interact, that is the question...?
The ability to interconnect different bits of social networking with a website is quite exciting. By integrating Facebook or Twitter buttons into your webpages you can enable easy sharing of your content by your visitors.
The huge growth in popularity of social media sites means that any site can benefit from linking to them: not only in terms of spreading the word, but also as a means of raising the bar with search engines, as all the social media sites seem to score highly in results terms.
The code to add links or widgets into a webpage code is usually fairly simple to incorporate, especially in plain HTML pages. Many php scripts can include them too, but a good number of those such as Wordpress, PHP-Fusion, Joomla, etc. have mods (add-ons) that do this to save you having to hack (and possibly break in the process!) the code.
Go on, give it a try, you might be surprised as to who drops by!
The huge growth in popularity of social media sites means that any site can benefit from linking to them: not only in terms of spreading the word, but also as a means of raising the bar with search engines, as all the social media sites seem to score highly in results terms.
The code to add links or widgets into a webpage code is usually fairly simple to incorporate, especially in plain HTML pages. Many php scripts can include them too, but a good number of those such as Wordpress, PHP-Fusion, Joomla, etc. have mods (add-ons) that do this to save you having to hack (and possibly break in the process!) the code.
Go on, give it a try, you might be surprised as to who drops by!
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