Phew, it’s getting crowded in here!…New ways of connecting people are coming hard and fast with a handful of cool APIs a day being launched to connect to big social media networks and mobile devices as well as pure bred micro blogging tools (Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku, My Say, Hictu) and the new rash of ‘Gauge your happiness tools’ (Moodmill, I Rate My Day and Emotionr). In fact tools are being developed to help us manage all our social media tools more efficiently! The buzz is tangible, in fact it’s overpowering.

I was at a social media master class a couple of weeks ago that was hosted by Stowe Boyd, the guy who coined the term ‘Social Tools’. It was a warm up session for attendees to the outstanding Thinking Digital Conference (Book for 2010 now!). As the session went on it was clear the focus in the room, with the exception of JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta) who spoke passionately about people engaging with people, was on the relative merits of tools and new social media platforms being developed.

This left me pondering, ‘Are we too focused on tools?’… (more…)

From Mark’s IfWeCanYouCan Blog.

What a day. I’ve been lucky enough to attend a few Entrepreneurs Forum events before, including one annual conference but none have been as inspiring or interesting as this one.

The speakers were first class. As a young business, it was very interesting to listen to presentations from the likes of Matthew Riley (Daisy Communications), Martin Lightbody (Finsbury Foods) and Richard Farleigh (Dragon’s Den) covering their experiences, both good and bad. It was inspiring to hear about the challenges, issues, and opportunities that have moulded them and their businesses while trying to apply the lessons learnt to our context.

It was also really good to meet the other finalists for the first time. It certainly seems like a great bumch of people and we will certainly be maintaining contact with some of them once the campaign has reached its climax.

Both the main conference, and the following dinner were great experience especially as there were a number of activities lined up for the finalists throughout the day (and night). These included photo shoots, audio comments and video interviews as well as being asked to stand up in front of the conference audience to be highlighted as the ‘ones to watch in the North East’, and ofcourse the Better team got “punk’d” on the evening from Diva’s Incognito….so thanks to the EF team for making us feel a little like pop stars (we even had our own custome badges!).

Here’s looking forward to next year…

From Mark’s IfWeCanYouCan Blog.

Well, its been a crazy week. Its now over a week since the finalists where announced and time has just flown by.

Not only have we been hectic in the business working on a few proposals and the studio has been working all hours on client projects, we’ve also been trying to embrace the increased profile and new experiences that have come from being part of the IWCYC Campaign. (more…)