Thanks for stopping by – but we have moved now over to http://jamespoulter.co.uk where you can find the updated version of Sunday Latte Lamentations for Social Media News, Poetry, Ramblings and general frivolity.

Thanks for reading and your continued support and constructive criticism!

James

If you are that publishing house and are now reading this – then haha… It worked.

the slushpile

Just to caveat, I am not reposting this just because we got a glowing review, but because her perspective on how to engage with Mummy bloggers shines a light on a lot of the rubbish PR attempts that we have seen in recent months.

Thanks again to @glowstars @YoungMummyUk and @Kellyfairy for coming along.

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So if you head over to http://jamespoulter.co.uk you will find “Sunday Latte Lamentations” in a somewhat under construction phase.

I am setting up on WordPress (hosted by lovely fellow @leesmallwood – a thoroughly decent chap) . Which obviously means a overhall of themes and widgets, but also a re-evaluation of why I blog, what I blog and how I blog.

After a lovely morning spent down in Kent @ Huggies HQ (Client: Kimberley Clarke) meeting some of the UK’s finest Mum bloggers (@glowstars @YoungMummyUk @Kellyfairy to be precise) really made me think.

I started out blogging as a way of documenting my thoughts and poetry that I began writing in a more serious fashion about 3 years ago (hence the title of this blog – spurred by a poem I wrote by the same name). It really was just the thoughts, ideas and melody that roll out of the life rhythm that is being a Londoner. However over time that changed and moulded into what my blog is today, an amalgamation of social communication-marketing-culture thing, with a quasi-Christian slant on the world. Which interestingly is never what I set out to be about, it just kind of happened that way.

After chatting to the Mums this morning it appear that my experience is not to dissimilar to a lot of bloggers out there, we all start with a passion, a realisation that others might give 2pence about our thoughts, and a desire for a connection with those who share that passion, but over time things get in the way that dilute that (SEO, Google Analytics, #tags).

By no means am I saying that this dilution is a bad thing, I think is just inevitable, however I do wonder what it is that keeps people like you coming back to read these musings.

So that leads me back (kind of) to where I began, as I re-evaluate the way I blog I would love to know why it is you read what I write. What topics interest you, what would you like more of or less of? Or do you honestly just end up clicking inanely on whatever tweetdeck serves you up? (I know I am guilty of that).

I am not out just to please the crowd, but if writing, blogging, journeying, or whatever you call it is truly about passions, and a desire for connection, then it’s always nice to know what you connect with, what you are passionate about, what makes you tick.

So please – let me know.

Some pics taken at #SMWF from my Kodak Zi8. Sorry for crappy lighting on some!

Posted via email from jamespoulter’s posterous

Kicking off with a video spotlight: How The Interenet is Changing Advertising.

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This cracking little “epipheo” presents captures very succinctley something which as been nagging at my brain for a while. Something I like to call “The Gutenberg Effect“. For me the technological shifts that have truely rocked the world have always brought about a new way of thinking and with that new way, an outburst of creativity has spread like wildfire.

Looking back to creation of the printing press, what Gutenberg achieved was not only a technological shift, but a cultural one that allowed people for the first time to hold the printed word in their hands and read it for themselves. A technology that was a key driver in the cultural shift that ultimately ended up becoming The Reformation.

We have seen this process repeat throughout recent history with the creation of commercial radio springing up from the creativity of HAM radio set users in the early 20th century, and then far more recently in the boom of satellite television. Each has created a shift in the way we communicate with one another. Each has demanded something new of the sender and recipient of communication. With print it was undivided attention. With radio it became a background medium, with TV a shared collective experience.

The internet in general, but increasingly the social web provides a different form of communication. A new kind of shared experience, that is not media specific, time specific or geography specific. An experience that is neither broadcast nor narrowcast. Yet is still a shared experience, but that experience is fundamentally different, as for the first time the way in which that experience is consumed lies in the hands of the recipient, NOT the sender.

This means big things for the advertising and marketing industries. It means a change of mindset, a different thinking is required, as we can no longer control or stipulate that a communication has to be consumer OUR way. But be open to the fact that our communication will be consumed, when, where and how the recipient wants. The sooner that marketers get that this shared experience is a movable typing twittering tubing experience, not a media experience, the better.

More on that in the coming weeks…

in other news…

A fantastic dissection of HootSuite for the unitiated from my chum Gemma Went

10 Great Newbie Twitter Mistakes Made By Businesses from Mike Johansson on Social Media Today

And a great presentation from Coca-Cola on Social Media care of Robin Grant @ wearesocial

We kick off today with a couple of summaries from the fantastic #LikeMinds summit, which took place down in Exeter, England on Friday and Saturday last week. We Are Like Minds is a very interesting blend of business, culture, technology and marketing – all connected by (to use Mr Blanchard‘s term) – Social Communications (we are ditching social media for now…). You can check out Olivier’s summary of the summit here. After much internal debate (and some nagging from @drewellis) I had to turn down an invite, which may in hindsight been a mistake – as it looks like all involved had a great time, evidenced by the enthusiasm of my friend Gemma Went‘s summary of the conference here.

Just to take up Olivier Blanchards point, as I think he has got it as close to right as we can at the moment, “Social Communications” may be an important change in our vernacular – as he make a very well made (and succinct) point – it was never about media in the first place. I truly believe we are not far away from (as I mentioned last week) that social “media” is going away. What we are seeing around us at the moment is not too dissimilar from the evolution of the printing press, radio, television or telephony, merely an evolution of communications.

We are right to point out that there is something of a cultural phenomenon going on here though, so for now to keep the “social” bit attached to the term seems appropriate, as this is a fundamentally different method of communications that what we have seen before, particularly in the business world. Never before has such a freedom of interaction been allowed to foster in business culture, navigating between hierarchy and rank to just connect people to people – finding like minds. That is something different. So for now “social communications” will have to do.

In other news:

“What the Hell is Social Media?” (Good question in the light of the above!) – A great little video wung its way into my reader this week via fellow Surbitonian and all round good guy Rax Lakhani.

A great explanation of integrated communications in the form of “The Big Social Media Marketing Plan” (or should that be communication?) from the pen of Penn Olson

And a fantastic productivity tool via @lifehacker called InBox2 which combines email and socialnetworking to better organise tasks and files in a lovely way. One to try out! (Windows only for now sadly, but a good web app for all you Mac’s out there).

Kicking off the week with a cracker from a good friend of mine, Mr Jeff Pulver.

In this video, (origin) filmed during the Real Time discussion at DLD10 which was held on January 25, 2010 in Munich, Germany, Jeff discusses the way that social media IS going away.

Other cracking reads this week include:

Read about how Facebook Mobile Is Now Bigger Than Twitter from Mr Brian Solis

Find out how 30 publishers are charging for online content from the gentleman Neville Hobson

A thoroughly insightful read from my friend and Ex-Boss John Bell on The Psychology of Influence and Sharing

And to round-up your Monday, get further accustomed with TheWayoftheWeb, and look into whether PR should pay bloggers to post?

That little lot should keep you occupied till Tuesday! Enjoy – J.

So why am I leaving Ogilvy? There is no good reason, I was not looking or after something new. (Que overused metaphor) But every now and again something comes along an interrupts the norm, and you make a decision to follow a new path, or stay on the road you are on. When Holly Ward at Biss got in touch back before Christmas to say they were looking for a Digital Director, I was a little shocked, in our subsequent meeting we discussed how headhunting really can be a disturbing thing – you are so engrossed in what you are doing, so embedded, that it is hard to imagine what uprooting and moving to something different could even look like.

It was around this time that I started reading one of the most fantastic books I have ever read – “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” by the phenomenal Don Miller (read his blog here). In it Don explores the process of being approached by a production company about making a movie about his own memoir, the bestselling book “Blue Like Jazz”. Through the book, Don explores the idea of what makes a good story and what it’s like to try “editing my own life”. Throughout the book Don explorers the way that we are much like characters, and life is a like a story. However he also explores how good stories, fictional ones, are not like real life at all – everything is exaggerated, accellerated – the drama is added in, because characters have to develop, and usually to develop them, you often have to put them through the mangle.

And so there I found myself, the opportunity to uproot, to mangle, to tell a new story, or stick in the one I am in. Which by the way is far from boring. In fact the past 14 months @ Ogilvy have been some of my greatest. I have met more challenges, people and problems that ever before, and grown through it, with more people to thank that a Kate Winslet acceptance speech. But now as I sit on the cusp of the next chapter in my own little story I, like Don in his book, remember the last scene from the Catcher In The Rye from the recently late, and eternally great J. D. Salinger, when we realise Holden Caufield has been telling the whole story to a counsellor in a nuthouse. And I too wonder , as Don, Salinger and many more to come will wonder if that’s what it will be like when this is all over. We will sit down with God in the new Jerusalem, on the sidestreet cafés of the golden paved streets of Zion and tell him our little story, and he will tell us what it all meant.

So here we go. A new chapter. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Yesterday at the Midem Music conference in Cannes Bach Technology announced their latest development: MusicDNA. Billed as the most significant development in digital music since the invention of the MP3, Bach’s Chief Exec Stefan Kohlmeyer hopes the new format will become the MP3s successor.

The new format bundles together the traditional music file with data such as an Artist’s twitter URL, music videos, blog links and YouTube Channels, as well as artwork and lyrics – seemingly a slight evoltion of the Apple iTunes LP format launched last year. In an interview with paidcontent:UK Kohlmeyer said:

“We bundle all the audio data and business intelligence in one file. The data can be automatically updated whenever you are online.”

The idea of this content being able to self-evolve is an interesting one, and if it can be executed seemlessly, without creating enough data-fat to sink the Titanic then it could be an interesting proposition. However is this all just a little too late? When you consider that we have had MySpace for the better part of a decade, and the cult of celebrity twitter stalking taking up much of the red-top gossip pages, it seems we have been getting on OK in hunting down the content-around-the-content for ourselves.

Asking around, I know very few people who have been avidly downloading iTunes LP files, and even lesser major record labels committing to the format in any big way. As always the success of the idea will be in the execution, if MusicDNA is to truly shift the genetics of downloading then the cost, size and adoption by the major manufacturers will allow it to sink or swim, if these ingredients don’t add up, it’ll be just another backwater mutant format. The neutered ninja turtle of the digital age.