I’m delighted to announce that great local band Saskia Says will be playing for us.

Nina De Winter will be co-hosting.

Jonathan

That’s why I tweeted just a few minutes ago asking for guest contributors. From time to time I like to throw the gates open and let people from the local community have a chat about social media issues that matter to them. Right now I’m looking for more guest blog posts, not just because it’s interesting to get a different perspective, but also because I don’t have the time this blog deserves.

We already have one helpful person signed up and we’re hoping to bring you her guest post in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, if anyone else would like to get involved please leave a comment here or on Facebook, or tweet at us with a short pitch. We’ll get back to you soon to let you know if we think the idea will be a good fit for the blog.

Each guest post is published with the option for the author to include a brief biography and link to their website.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Rachel: Please tell us a little bit about your business, i.e. how long it’s been open, what your inspiration was and what you do.

Russell: The business has been trading 3 weeks, inspiration was a passion for food – local food, specialise in selling only local produce either by way of groceries or in a full breakfast and lunch menu.

Rachel: How long have you been using social media for your business and what made you start?

Russell: I’ve been using social media since the business opened, started using social media to raise awareness and create conversation amongst potential customers.

Rachel: I’ve been told you’re about to start submitting recipes for @Glos365 to publish online. What made you decide to do that and what do you hope to achieve by doing this?

Russell:I’m submitting recipes to make the business interactive, to encourage repeat hits on the website and to promote the type of food and ideas that are behind the deli.

Rachel: Have you gained new customers from using social media?

Russell: Yes, increased twitter followers who then see the types of ideas and offers I promote and come and try them.

Rachel: I noticed in my Twitter stream you were also running a competition for people who follow the account and RT your competition announcement. How many entries have you had so far and are you pleased with the response you’ve had?

Russell: Around 20 so far, and yes I am very happy with the response so far, although there is still a week to run so am hoping for many more.

Rachel: And finally, when will you start publishing your recipes and where can we find them?

Russell: Recipes will be weekly on a Monday both on the Cotswold Deli website (which is still under construction) and on the Glos365 website, first one should be live by this coming Monday 20/09/2010.

You can follow the Cotswold Deli on Twitter. Look out for competition tweets and you could win a week’s worth of lunches!

The Listbook

 The Listbook (url: http://www.thelistbook.com) went live on 26th July 2010. It gives everyone the opportunity to share their knowledge and views with an eager audience in that most appealing and familiar of forms – the list. Whether top tens are your thing or you prefer to go for something a little more expansive, the Listbook gives you the opportunity to showcase your mental wares. The site is simple to use and has an ethical stance concerning your personal information.

 The lists you contribute will then be spliced and diced, ranked, rated and shared, earning you points and badges and giving you the chance to see if what you’ve written has gone down well or crashed and burned. The most popular lists and authors are featured on the home page, promoting your content and making you famous. When more than one list on the same topic is submitted List 0 is automatically created – aggregating the content to create a master list with items ranked by popularity, giving you the chance to see how your opinions match up with the crowd’s.

This ambitious local start-up has dreams of becoming one of the UK’s biggest online success stories by providing a valuable and entertaining resource. Authors have already taken the opportunity to write some local lists, submitting their favourite Gloucestershire tourist spots for others to rate.

“theListbook.com introduces a fun, competitive element to the idea of collecting together knowledge on a large scale,’ said Listbook founder Robert Colquhoun. ‘Our goal is to build a fantastic resource based on user-contributed lists that are both informative and entertaining, as well as incentivising users for participating. We hope that the users will spur each other on to come up with exciting new lists as they see originality and quality information being rewarded by their peers.”

 The team was given a helping hand by a group of students from the University of Gloucestershire. The group was granted exclusive early access to the site in exchange for their views and feedback.

 If the rise of the internet, and more specifically social media, has taught us anything, it is that people love to share what they know or, perhaps more accurately, what they believe to be true. Whatever the reason, the need to share information and express opinion with our online communities appears to be inescapable.

 The popularity of the list format may be explained by some research conducted by psychologist George Miller in 1956. He discovered that when people are asked to recall a list of objects viewed for a short amount of time and then removed, the average number remembered was almost always somewhere between 5 and 9. His resulting research paper, titled ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information’, is one of the most famous psychological studies ever and plays an important role in our understanding about short-term memory.

Like online encyclopedia site Wikipedia, the Listbook crowdsources the wisdom of its contributors for the benefit of every visitor. But by placing equal weighting on fact and opinion the team hope they have created a site that is as entertaining as it is useful. The Listbook is a level playing field where everyone’s opinion is equally valid and nobody is excluded from contributing if they have something to get off their chest.

 The Listbook truly harnesses the wisdom of crowds to create a democratic collaboration of the many for the many. A thousand individual lists are interesting, informative and entertaining – aggregated they become really useful, sharing knowledge and opinion, and through these shared interests powerful social search and research opportunities are created.

 The search is on to find backers to fund an ambitious development project that will see the central site functions expanded and adapted to include the development of their knowledge aggregation system and increased social capability for their users.

Yesterday I was a lost soul looking for information. I had trawled the internet (well, maybe not the whole internet) via Google, throwing out long and short tail queries like my life depended on it. I found a few useful bits and pieces but the going was tough and it was a subject I’m not an expert in. I found myself thinking, “If only I had access to an expert in the field who I could ask for help and guidance.”

As I was sat in front of my screen lamenting my woeful lack of real-life connections I remembered someone I’d found on Twitter a few weeks ago. “Hang on a cotton picking minute” (as my partner would say) “wasn’t she an expert in this very subject?” I checked her profile and it was true. I sent a couple of DMs (because one DM is never enough) and within an hour I had a response which led to a very useful DM conversation.

Fast forward a couple of hours and there’s me, grinning like a hungry person at a chip shop with my super useful web links courtesy of my new favourite Twitterer. (If that is a real word)

This is Twitter being very good and helping me find useful information fast!

Cut to ‘Naughty Twitter’

A few weeks ago I witnessed (along with many others) an argument happening live on the Twit-stream. And when I say argument I don’t mean a discussion with raised voices and emphatic hand gestures. I mean a proper fight! I think if these people had conducted the argument face to face there would have been actual hair pulling, pushing and possibly even raspberry blowing.

At the time I was tempted to write a much fuller post going into all the ridiculous details but I didn’t want to get drawn into the fight which seemed utterly pointless. It was also terrible PR, especially for one individual who seemed to be totally nuts and has since been unfollowed.

I will not be mentioning any names – many people will have witnessed the fight anyway and I leave them to draw their own conclusions about who should be on the naughty step!

(Note to audience: That’s right! I really am prepared to let you have your own opinion! If you disagree I will not harass you.)

That is Twitter being naughty, clogging my updates with playground style rants.

Of course, Twitter isn’t really good or naughty. It’s down to the people that use the service and it can become a playground, a boxing ring or even a University library (my current favourite).

However you use it, Happy Tweeting!

Are you saying too much online?

This is a guest post by Ian Randall

How many posts per day are too much? How can you find the valuable content from amongst the noise? These questions are becoming more relevant with the continued growth of social media and services. Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, Posterous, Twitter -all great examples at the cutting edge of the technology that’s changing how we communicate and interact with each other, and all capable of cross-posting between them.

A Google search shows widely differing opinions on how much is too much. It does seem to be a very personal thing as everyone’s needs are different. Personally, I have no products to sell and no customers to attract. I am purely a consumer of all this digital content so if someone is monopolising my timeline or continually reposting the same things I’m afraid that’s as easy to fix as clicking ‘unfollow’.

Would you follow a person on Foursquare if all the information is replicated on Twitter? Would you follow someone on Twitter if every tweet is republished to Facebook? There is so much new content out there to filter through, can you really spend your time reading and dealing with duplication? There is a real danger that anything of value you have to say can become swamped in the noise generated by everything else, and unfortunately the message becomes lost.

The answer lies with careful curation. This blog has already touched on the subject of using separate accounts for personal and professional tweets, that’s a great start. If I’m interested in your business, products or services I may not really care what you had for tea. If I’m interested in you personally then I’ll follow that account as well (unless they RT every tweet from the other account).

It’s really exciting to see the growth of these services in Gloucestershire, and some of the novel ways to take advantage of this new technology has been great to see. I’m excited for the future of what these can bring, but this is dependent on finding a way to be able to filter out what is relevant to me and what gives me personal value. Maybe this will become a feature of the next generation of these services, but it will become increasingly important as the amount of data grows.

Ultimately, those who post too much, those who just replicate from other sources and create noise become like the loud obnoxious guy at the party. They may think they’re the centre of attention, but the real and interesting conversation is going on in a corner, away from them and their noise where others can hear themselves think. And just like that, the conversation has passed them by.

If you’d like to sumbmit a guest blog post email csmc@cheltsocialmediacafe.org.uk or tweet us a short pitch! We like to support local interests and new technological or social media ventures so don’t be shy.

She originally chose to follow them because they made interesting and useful announcements about local events so she knew everything they tweeted could be worth reading and possibly even diarising. The problems started when the account began posting personal updates too. Now there are announcements and twitpics that have nothing to do with local events and everything to do with some person she’s never met and isn’t really interested in.

I know in the past I’ve sent a few tweets from the @cheltsocmedcafe account when I should have reserved them for my personal account (during the election, for example). Luckily, someone stepped in and reminded me that I have different accounts for a reason!

If you’re concerned that your tweets are inappropriate for a personal, or a professional account then it may be worth opening up a whole new account to deal with it! By maintaining boundaries between your accounts you can avoid annoying a lot of followers. In the case of accounts like @cheltsocmedcafe where you want a mix of personal and ‘professional’ (or business related) tweets it can work too – just keep your overall purpose in mind!

Your objective should set the tone (and content) of your tweets.

A mix of expert and general public contributions should make this site fun and informative. Contributors from around the world have already added lists so there’ll be plenty of useful information to check out right from day one!

As you’d expect from any new web start-up it’s compatible with Twitter and Facebook to make sharing easy so it’s of special interest to SMC followers!

Students at the University of Gloucestershire have been helping to test the site and consideration has been paid to ensure it is user friendly and capable of generating its own income. They’ve also spent a lot of time making sure they get the privacy policy right so the service should be stress free.

The Listbook is the brainchild of Robert Colquhoun. It’s already received high praise in a review by Michael White who claimed that “This website… will be the internet’s best source of useful lists and let’s face it, everybody likes a good list.” The review also goes into the actual workings of the site so it’s worth taking a look at the whole page!

Look out for the launch announcements of theListbook.com next week!

Creative Director James Wilson, Listbook founder Robert Colquhoun and Community Manager Nobunao Amos

At first, I thought it must be some kind of joke but with treatment centres’ opening in the UK, US and China it’s clearly more of a problem than I’d imagined. Further research shows that studies indicate increasing levels of internet addiction in a number of other countries such as Italy, Pakistan, Iran, Germany and the Czech Republic.

Net addiction expert Dr Kimberly Young poses the following questions to help diagnose Facebook addiction.

Are personal relationships taking a backseat to Facebook? Do you think about Facebook even when you’re offline? Do you use Facebook to escape problems or homework? Do you stay on Facebook longer than intended? Have you ever concealed Facebook use?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’ you might be a borderline addict.

Is the lure of instant social gratification or entertainment too tempting? Are people turning to the internet en masse after losing their jobs in the recession? Whatever the reason, people are getting desperate for treatment, either for themselves or for loved ones.

In China, worried parents send their teenage children to training camps. Until July last year some Chinese clinics also offered electric shock treatment although this has now been banned.

In the US and UK, cognitive-behavioural talk therapy is the norm at special ‘cold-turkey’ rehabilitation centres.

So far the UK only has one centre and it’s aimed at helping teenagers (also known as ‘screenagers’). As well as providing afflicted teens with the opportunity to ditch their internet habits the treatment also focuses on teaching them traditional face-to-face social skills at the residential unit. It’s offered by the Capio Nightingale Hospital and you can find out more here.

Ironically, many sources for internet addiction are available on Facebook and Twitter. I guess they have to be wherever their best customers are!

The major resource used for this blog post was http://www.netaddiction.com/ but you can look them up at Facebook here or find Dr Kimberly Young on Twitter here.

I wonder if any of our followers qualify as Facebook, Twitter, or Net addicts?

It’s an upcoming social media platform with lots of potential so if you don’t know much about it now, maybe you should?

Jonathan is holding a taster workshop to teach local business people about the benefits of using Foursquare. The taster session will run from 5.30 to 6pm on the 9^th July 2010 at Pepper Crescent and it’s absolutely free to attend!

This means you can learn a bit about how to gain local recognition and attract new customers before joining the fun at our next café event from 6-8pm!

A follow up workshop called ‘Get more customers with Foursquare’ is planned for the 15^th July between 10am and 12pm at the Exmouth Arms and you can book your tickets here.

We’d appreciate it if café regulars could tweet about the workshops and mention them to anyone you think might be interested.

About Jonathan:

Jonathan advises people on how to get the most out of social media for their business. He regularly runs workshops on a variety of social media topics and often attends networking events like our Social Media Cafe and DigiTalks. You can find him on Twitter @jonnop and @jpfestival or visit his website at www.intranetfuture.com