Last week I did a little presentation on Digital Activism at the Brighton and Hove Socialist Party meeting. Here it is, all the slides are just images but all my notes are on the notes tab (if you view this presentation on Slideshare) and you can download the presentation too. The commentary is pretty much all taken from all over the internet, but I’ve referenced all my sources so hopefully nobody minds. You can download my notes here: digital activism PDF.

Thinking about giving presentations and public speaking lately… I’ve done conference speaking to groups of 80-100 marketers without much worry before, but put me in front of 10 people I really really respect and admire (like some awesome clients, proper geeks, or highly intellectual socialists) and I totally freak out. So yeah, my presentation didn’t really go that well due to nerves… I need to work on that!

OK so this post is a few weeks late and I haven’t blogged in a while, but since it seemed to go down well at Social Media World Forum and got featured on Slideshare’s homepage (woohoo!), I thought it’d be worth putting my presentation on my blog too. This is what I presented at SMWF 2010 in London. Lots of free tools to use for social media research and measurement, in addition to, or instead of, paid-for tools, depending on what you’re trying to do and what your budget is. The Google analytics bit comes with the disclaimer that with most social media campaigns you’re not aiming for high volumes of traffic, but good quality traffic and high engagement in the place that you’re active, rather than just trying to pull people to your site.

If anyone wonders what people in their 60s do online, here’s my folk’s online activity:

Last week my Dad joined Facebook. My Mum has been on Facebook for around a year. Now when you’re new to Facebook, you get a progress bar to encourage you to come back and do more:

• Dad does social bookmarking, once Furl now Diigo, as well as being an active member of MyLibraryThing. I tried to get him to use del.icio.us but I think he’s sticking to Diigo.
• My mum uses MSN but my Dad doesn’t. If I don’t respond immediately she thinks I’m ignoring her.
• My Dad is a Flickr Pro but my Mum isn’t. I bought him his first Flickr pro account because he was getting into photography and I was sick of getting huge images filling up my inbox all the time! Dad uploads photos that Mum takes too.
• My Mum started a blog recently, about living with Rheumatoid Arthritis, an Aspergic husband, and politics.
• My Dad prefers to microblog on Twitter, is on Last.FM and uses Spotify.

There must be something to the fact that each of them has favoured such different social channels through which to connect. Not sure how much is to do with gender and how much to do with their individual personalities, but Mum’s seem much more to do with communication (Facebook, blogging and MSN) whereas Dad’s seem more hobby specific and functional (Flickr, Diigo, MyLibraryThing, Last.FM).

I was going to describe the new text based MMORPG, ‘Spymaster‘ which has just hit Twitter, but then I realised this article said pretty much all I was going to say. Except… people have already started hating it (e.g. The Guardian’s Technology correspondent Charles Arthur – that got a few RT (re-tweets). Because the default settings make it so that everything you do on the game sends out a tweet to your stream, your stream is gonna get clogged with #spymaster tweets and nothing else, annoy all your followers etc., pretty quickly unless you change them to be minimal/non-existent.  However, right now, lots of people are pretty excited about what appears to be a standard, traditional text based game – mainly because of its clever integration with the Twitter API.  I predict there will be a big hoo-ha over the next few days, some people will be loving spymaster, some will be hating it, it is going to be big, it is incredibly viral, and I think it will end up being quickly shunned by the Twitter community.

But in the meantime… I’m gonna be playing it. On Team Russia of course!

Whose side are you on?

p.s. if you want a spymaster invite, you don’t actually need one, you can just sign in with your Twitter username and password. I did and it worked. Also, it’s weird, when you send an invite to someone, they get a DM with the spymaster website address, but no invite code or anything, so it’s not even doing anything that clever in that instance.