And the more personal/irrelevant things to http://theanke.posterous.com

See you there!

Right now, this is what it looks like:
wordpress blog (this) for professional blog posts.
Posterous blog for everything from audioboos to pictures from a recent walk.
Conscious Communications site for marketing of my consulting services.
Speak For Yourself site for courses.

This is the plan:

Conscious Communications will be phased out. It’s a horrendous name anyways. The hosting from there will be used for ankeholst.com, my online presence. I haven’t decided on a platform for that yet.
‘Speak for yourself’ is nearly perfect, it needs a static landing page, and needs to include well-written narratives and case studies. Speak for yourself is also going to be my future brand name.

I will keep this blog and the posterous blog as they both fulfill slightly different functions.

As for platforms, I built Speak for yourself on joomla, and am happy with that. But as for ankeholst.com – I really don’t know. WordPress didn’t quite do what I needed it to do, I might play with the current consciouscommunications.co.uk wordpress to find a theme that works for me. I did build london.localgovcamp.com on wordpress which was great.

Anyways – any ideas for what other platforms I could use, let me know please! Or I could just build it on Dreamweaver…

This, for example, is an embeddable events listing service, by GlobalDataPoint, a company already involved in both creating and finding uses for event data streams. They already hold 40,000 geocoded venues in their database so are a likely candidate. Working with local government, they are very happy to adapt every application to the individual council website.

Here is what it would look like for Haringey Council’s event pages. It’s such a big improvement to what is there now.

Opinions? Would you like to try this service for your council websites? Are there others already doing this well? Let me know.

Here’s the service in some more detail:

Met David Flood of http://rateablevalue.co.uk last week at the Hub KingsX after having just gotten out of a WorkSnug meeting. We got chatting and he mentioned that he had just gotten an empty commercial property just down the road and is looking for uses. I asked if I could see it and it all went from there. We had lunch, then I went home, then we had dinner, the next morning I introduced him to the Tuttle bunch, all the time talking about the possibilities of connecting the space with the creative London bunch, but also the commercial training/marketing/event scene.

The result was a blog and @210pentonville, that I’m now running. I’m also holding the key so am able to show people around. And most importantly, I’m able to bring in more people to come up with more ideas.

Crouch End is one of the most social media saturated areas outside of central London. While working with the twitter account for Haringey Libraries I’ve kept a close eye on the activities of local businesses on twitter.

It’s an interesting scene. The attempts to automate twitter feeds (@tatlersllp) are juxtaposed with a really personable estate agent (@steveatcastles), a very cool @flashbackrecords with lots of friends versus a Rock Around the Clock who would never touch twitter, @momentoprints, @fairwindonline, @synergystudioN8 doing a good job of it, of course a lot of locals talking about all sorts of things.

Two of the most iconic local businesses, @dunnsbakery and @budgens_CE, were always going to be interesting to follow. But the comments about @dunnsbakery was that it was a pure marketing channel, so not really social, and people wouldn’t follow it for this reason. @budgents_CE’s last tweet was 4 July.

Around that time, a lot of people were talking about Budgens Crouch End and it’s famed roof vegetable garden. But none of this was picked up and engaged with, which to me was such a big wasted opportunity. Some of the tweets can still be picked up by using google search.

How much more useful would the twitter account have been if Thornton’s Budgens had interacted with some of the people who were waxing lyrical about this great idea, and used this to build a strong community around itself? This is what twitter is really good at; a great idea, which is being talked about by so many people (as well as being picked up by national media), can really serve to boost followership.

The result is a dedicated group of people, an online community. These people are not just passive consumers but actively engaged in what you do. They feel ownership, because they are part of your success. They will amplify your messages to their followers and thus be your greatest marketing asset.

This is, in essence, how social media works. But many organisations are trying and not many are really succeeding. That’s why I’m really excited to have been given a space to open the Unlibrary inside Hornsey Library in Crouch End.

Sometimes a chat and some encouragement by the right person is all a small business owner needs to get going with something like this – it’s essentially social, it’s not about technology, although technology is obviously needed. Because we have been given this space I can make myself available for local businesses to have regular chats and workshops around this.

The Unlibrary is not funded by Haringey Council, however I think it potentially can be so useful for local businesses that there surely is a way to get a lot of support.

The Unlibrary is such an exciting project also because it brings creative and business uses of digital media together. There are many spaces being developed, giving advice and running workshops around social media, but none of them in a creative space like a library. My partner on the running of the Unlibrary is Chris Meade, another local, who runs if:book, a charity which is looking at the future of the book in the digital age. He used to run the poetry cafe and has a network of writers interested in also learning about amplifying their words on social media.

Apart from this, the interior designers of Studio Tilt who have been working on some of the most inspiring spaces in the new co-working culture have agreed to take the Unlibrary on as a flagship project.

With all of this said, my proposal is very simple. I’d like to help Budgens Crouch End re-start its social media efforts, in a very fruitful way, and I’d love for Budgens to be a long-term partner to the Unlibrary. My project @haringeylibrary (which I proposed to Haringey Council a year ago, ran until May this year and then after doing workshops and a lot of personal discussions, handed over to library staff) is now the most successful libraries twitter account in the UK, and I did this on a few months at one day’s work per week (as this was all the libraries department could afford.)

I’d like to propose to work 5 days with Budgens. The result will be a much better understanding on Budgens’ side of how to engage and pick up interesting conversations, thus build a great and involved community around Budgens Crouch End. The other result will be exposure Budgens would gain as a major partner to the Unlibrary, providing for one of the unlibrarians that month, helping many other locals benefit from it.

To find out more about the unlibrary, follow us on twitter (@theunlibrary) and have a look at our blog with pictures from the unlibrary launch and a 3D twitter map of London.

Of course I have since realised that there are lots of different approaches and ideas. Most prominently PR agencies have formed digital agencies whose business model is to run a client’s social media, selling their services on the strength of authenticity and innovation.

My point is still that the only person I want to hear from, is a person inside the organisation, and ideally somewhere fairly visionary. I don’t care much for social media going the way of comms of yore, where by the time the information has filtered through the different departments and ends up with the social media person posting the updates, I might just as well be a journalist reading through a stash of press releases.

But I digress. I’m actually not as averse to digital agencies as it sounds. There is a place and a time for them. I have also seen organisations throwing a lot of money on social media and not getting much return, due to the fact that they decide *not* to have one digital agency to partner with but keep social media in-house, partnering with a variety of smaller agencies and individuals for bits and bobs here and there.

However, my idea, the “speak for yourself” model, has now proved itself. My project with the London Borough of Haringey, getting the Libraries started on twitter, has been brought to a successful conclusion when I handed it over earlier this month, and the Libraries are now tweeting for themselves. The Assistant Director for the libraries is happy with staff taking the twitter account forward and frequently gets personally involved.

I shall write up a proper updated case study with all the numbers and details, but in the meantime – I’ve shown that it can be done, is probably the most cost-effective way of doing it, and I’m available to work with other organisations to develop their social media presence. (That’s the drawback for me – I frequently get to look for new clients once I handed over another account!) I agree this model is not for every size and kind of organisation but if you know somebody who might be open to speaking for themselves – I’d be grateful for an introduction.

Ok. I will stop begging now

Is it mostly a project management/motivational tool? Do you mostly need to manage teams of people working on the same thing, needing access to the same secure files, to online realtime meeting (chat) rooms, whiteboards, discussion boards? Of is it a tool to strengthen and maximise connections formed at collaborative events and conferences? There is a local company called Huddle.net who does these things, and they are developing really quickly. I’ve used them for collaborative conference planning, I like their platform, and they are quick to implement changes if you suggest them.

There are some others that do other things well. BasecampHQ.com is part of a package for small businesses to take care of their project management, Customer Relationship Management, etc – but doesn’t scale as well. Alfresco.com takes the social integration a lot further, it works better if your users are mostly on twitter already. Which might well be the case, I don’t know.

A quick case study for how online community building/collaboration can work these days.

Akvo (http://akvo.org) is a start-up showing how IT changes lives, literally. It’s both a database of water/sanitation related projects around the world, with real-time updates coming via SMS straight from the field (an idea which Akvo is built around), widgets showing off these projects on partners’ websites, and a Wiki (Akvopedia), a water and sanitation related resource of knowledge. The idea being that a lot of knowledge is being collected by NGOs around the world but now we have the technology to free it from the dusty shelves and make it available to the people who need it.

Akvo is an organisation whose employees live and work all over the world. Headquarters based in the Netherlands, founders live and work in the Netherlands, Stockholm and London, developers in California and Scotland, a community of partners all over the world. Much of their communications (whatever is not priviledged) are happening in real time and completely discoverable on Twitter. They all blog and create content of their work, they use video, audio, pictures to document what they do, they have their CRM system securely in the cloud so they can access contact data from wherever they are, they use ichat and skype to talk to each other every day. As a result, they are able to have a thriving community and have built links with just about everyone else working in that field, plus managed to become the technical partner for Live Earth, which is quite a feat for such a young organisation.

Obviously some of this is going to be more or less applicable depending on the particular organisation and its activities. However, a fact is that many of the tools are free. Wikis (you already have one), twitter, skype, google wave, linkedin and its groups. Platforms to pull these things, and people, together.

To be creatively collaborative – start where you are. People meet at events. In my network, I have a brilliant personal community on twitter of people who work in similar areas, because I volunteered to run events, and I keep in constant touch with them on twitter. It’s worth a lot more than the money I could have been paid to run those events (it’s almost every day that I throw a question out and get an instant reply from my network, saving me lots of research time). In your network, there are events, people meet, I personally would start with a way of helping people to keep in touch after meeting at those events. Create a platform and then run workshops at the events about getting involved. It’s not a case of if you build it they’ll come – the important thing is the person to pull the tech together and gets people involved

Last week was the annual Learning Pool conference – I managed to go on the night before but felt ill on the day of the event (it was a virus, not what you’re thinking!)

I did manage to talk shop at the party, and learned that Learning Pool provides exactly the e-learning infrastructure I’d need to run Speak For Yourself courses. We are in talks, and hopefully by the time the Unlibrary is official, Speak For Yourself will be up and running as well.

We spoke about a lot of things connected to the event. I took part last year and didn’t feel a huge amount of community engagement. It’s funny to think that I feel more positive community cohesion in the Local Government scene than in the Social Enterprise scene, even though I’m a prime suspect for engagement, having started a social enterprise with huge potential in my two years in Nigeria and inherently thinking of business in terms of social impact, without the need for fundraising by donations.

Yesterday Lizzie told me about a volunteer scheme which had been put in place in response to my remarks, where half a day of volunteering would enable you to have free entry to the rest of the day’s events.

SHINE is a big event with absolutely loads going on and it takes a lot of people to keep things running smoothly. We think there’s no-one better to help us do that than volunteers who’d love to come to the event. If you’d like to become a SHINE volunteer, help out for a day and then enjoy the rest of the unconference at your leisure, take a look at the kinds of things we’ll need your help with, and enter your details below if you’d like to volunteer during 13th-15th May, in central London. more details here

Thinking along the lines of what we’ve learned about community building, which essentially is aimed at forming a strong group of followers who have such a strong belief in what you do that they use their voice, connections, time, etc to help you further your goals, I’ve been left feeling that this approach lacks in appeal.

It doesn’t even make me feel that I want to take it up, as much as I really want to go and want to get in free (and considering how much I would potentially have to contribute, I think I should.) Consider that these are people who want to come to your event – most of them self-starters, with a fairly high opinion of themselves, and obviouslyfairly interesting views of the world, since they are interested in social enterprise: These are people you want to listen to.

Joining the event under this scheme instantly downgrades them to a lower level of attendee, which doesn’t invite a positive networking experience. I would have volunteered to facilitate conversations, or lead a group of conversation facilitators, but not to join a group girls who “think on their feet” (what a demeaning expression) and point your way if you’re lost.

So today’s community builder lesson is: don’t make your (potential) brand advocates feel like cheap labour. If you have simple signposter jobs – consider paying people to do those. You can’t pay for your ambassadors They are some of the most important assets you have, involve them, listen to them, give them schwag if you can.

Watch this space for a great WorkSnug Ambassador programme we are just about to release

James Cameron thinks Lakotas are “hopeless” and “dead-end society” – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/18/avatar-james-cameron-brazil-dam

And then:

As a Lakota on the Pine Ridge Rez, I would love to debate James Cameron on Lakota history. Bring It Bitch.

The article in question speaks about James Cameron, as a logical next step from making “Avatar”, joining the fight of indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest against losing their way of life to the third largest hydro-electric dam in the world. The paragraph Tashina took exception to was this:

Cameron said witnessing indigenous ceremonies and meetings in the Amazon had made him reflect on the plight of the North American Indians and inspired him to attempt to give the “global consciousness… a heads up”.

“I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation,” he said. “This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar – I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder.”

I had the feeling that Cameron was at least waking up to the fact that something had gone horrendously wrong in the way Native Americans had been pushed off their land, which is more than you can say for most Americans these days. So I responded to Tashina

@TashinaBanks I don’t think he was attacking the Lakota. The way I read it, he was taking a stand for you guys, or would have seen himself support your cause if this was 130 years ago. He used the Lakota nation as an example for a tribe cheated out of their environment & lifestyle, yes you should try & talk to him & educate but I feel he’s one of the good guys who wants to make amends, & avoid this happening again.

Posting this for two reasons really – of course I’ve always been interested in Native American culture, but also, how about introducing James Cameron to the Dongria Kondh, who are going through the same process of having to fight for their environment and way of life against FTSE 100 company Vedanta Resources, whose tactics have been widely condemned.