Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Why Haven’t I Been Blogging?
You may have noticed the barren wilderness that has become my blog over the past few months as the posts have become a lot less frequent and for that I must apologise. While I’m hoping it will continue to be a useful resource for people that stumble across it in search of community management wisdom (I use that term loosely) my situation has changed and that has meant two things.
The first is that I’ve now got less time to blog and the second is that my focus has changed, which indirectly leads to the first thing. Confused yet? My role at Zmags has moved away from being all about community management, engaging with customers and building those relationships around an online space. Now I’m smack bang in the middle of the sales process acting as a technical consultant, a project lead, a strategist and a host of other things with even a bit of creative license thrown in for good measure. On the plus side, I’ve managed to bag myself the title of Director, Client Services EMEA, which means I’m now involved in the end-to-end process and not just what happens when a client has signed up.
With this being the case you may start to see a shift in what gets written about here as I have a different type of conversation with clients and build different types of relationships ala;
“client: wouldn’t it be cool to have a QR code in here”, “me: not if you are building the experience to be viewed on mobile because you’d be using the device you’d need to read the QR code with”, “client: oh yeah good point”
Needless to say, I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth and I have started to scribble down some thoughts for a short eBook on Gamification (a pet subject for me) but the number of posts from the early months at EA probably won’t ever return. I understand if that means you choose to hit that unsubscribe button but for those that opt to stay along for the ride, I’ll still aim to give you some food for thought, even if it is less frequently.
Thanks for your continued support and interest.
Slacking, Projects, Changes and the Future
As you may have noticed over the past few months, the blog has been a little bare in terms of new posts and content, for this I have to apologise. I have been seriously slacking and I put that down to not having my head in the game.
The project that I’ve been working on most recently (shortly coming to an end) has seen me take on more of a Producer role than a Community Manager one and as such I haven’t been in the thick of things, I’ve had my head stuck inside a CMS building websites!
This will all change in the middle of November, I’ll be completing one project and preparing for a fresh start elsewhere. My next role also promises to give me insight in to a beast I so far have not had the pleasure of dealing with on a day-to-day basis; B2B communities. My hope is that as I dive back in to the murky world of Community Management I’ll have some fresh stuff to write about and get back to a steady flow of posts.
Thanks to everyone that has subscribed or keeps clicking through every now and again, your support is appreciated.
Video: My Pecha Kucha Presentation
I got word last week that the video footage from the Digital Surrey event in April was finally available on YouTube. That means the presentation that I gave on the videogame industry is also now available for those that saw the SlideShare I uploaded but didn’t get the context.
A big thanks to Chris (@LondonCorporate) for filming the event.
Hopefully this will now make things a little clearer for those that are interested. From a Community Management point of view, some of the points made and ways of interacting with the audience can be linked back to the post I wrote about thinking outside the box.
Status Update – NY Resolutions
As we head towards the end of March I thought I should take the opportunity to write a quick update on the state of my New Year Resolutions. Whilst I haven’t been blogging that much over the past 2 weeks due to the operation this seems a sensible point to take a break from Community Management and go for something a little different.
So, what have I been doing and how are my resolutions getting on? Well, I’ve been providing ideas to my Dad and supporting where I can but the next stage won’t happen until he decides on all the content he wants for his website and actually writes it all down for me. We had a brief chat the other day so I’ve got a basic outline of what he is after but the core detail still needs to come from him.
On the charity side, I had a fantastic meeting with the team at @SpecialEffect today who demonstrated some great videogaming tech for people with disabilities. I had a go with the eye-gaze hardware and while a little daunting at first it really does add a new dimension to how you can play games. Much like for my Dad, I’ve given them a host of ideas on how they might be able to promote themselves further (using Social Media) and some contacts they should talk to. Hopefully I’ll be able to more actively support them in the future with some of their fundraising activities as well as raising awareness of what they are doing.
Outside of that, following a long phone conversation with @audio last night there might be some great opportunities to further establish some of the brands he has created in the Social Media space. Keep an eye out for developments on that front.
Not a lot tangible yet I’d like to think I’m moving in the right direction and there is still a lot of year left. Tomorrow I’ll be at Twestival in Farnham with the DigitalSurrey group for what should be a great event based on all the people involved / attending.
That’s it for now, the Community Management / Social Media pieces will resume shortly!
A Quiet Two Weeks
For those that have been following the recent posts here on the blog, or my activities on Twitter, tomorrow is the big day. With this being the case the next two weeks are going to be pretty quiet in terms of new articles as typing with one hand is a bit of a pain (apart from taking forever).
I will however be trying to do a few in order to keep things ticking over and if anyone has any topics they’d like me to take a look at and give my thoughts on please feel free to write a comment.
Outside of that, a big thank you to all those that have been reading so far and to those that have subscribed.