Alan Rae and I presented to the 3Market Social Enterprise Event at the University of Southampton today. The slides are here:

Thanks to funding from the Higher Education Entrepreneurship Group, Alan, Lorraine Warren and myself will be developing this introductory session into a series of more specialist workshops to be delivered both offline and online through 2010. Watch this space…

Digital marketing students might be interested in the following roles:

1. Toolkit Websites employ over 20 people, with about 12 in their office in Carlton Crescent, Southampton. It is a fast growing and dynamic web design agency with an innovative business model, providing websites for SMEs around the country.  The company is looking to improve its online marketing, and is looking for an intelligent marketing student, (preferably on a masters course) to come and give some insight and advice on digital marketing, lead generation, SEO and other innovative communication. This short, focused project might be of real interest to someone doing a marketing course at the university for a paper or a dissertation.

Details of the roles available and how to apply can be found here:

http://southampton.gumtree.com/southampton/72/52094672.html

http://southampton.gumtree.com/southampton/72/53089072.html

http://southampton.gumtree.com/southampton/89/52094389.html

2. Lloyd Davis is looking for a part-time intern (3 days per week for 3 months) working as an assistant and apprentice social artist, to start as soon as possible. Lloyd’s portfolio of social art projects includes:

The Tuttle Club
tuttle2texas
Centre for Creative Collaboration
Tuttle Consulting

He needs help with research, administrative and project management tasks. This is an opportunity for the job holder to expand their thinking about the social applications of the web, social enterprise and the use of social technologies in organisations.

The successful applicant will need to be comfortable writing for the web, expressing themselves in their own voice on blogs and social networking sites, but also speaking to people face to face and on the phone. They will gain exposure to Lloyd’s network of social media professionals, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians, artists, and academics. Experience of organising without an organisation and exploring the boundaries of how organisations need to function in a networked world will also be obtained.

Lloyd says: “ This is an unpaid position, although a zone 1-2 oystercard will be provided and I’ll buy you lunch. There’ll also be the occasional beer if you like that sort of thing…”

Email Lloyd on lloyd.davis@gmail.com and tell him why you’d like to work with him, and what in particular you think you can offer to the projects listed above.

Mike Lister (Principal Business Fellow at the School of Management) will be presenting this Seminar at the University of Southampton. Mike was one of the experts consulted by the Office of Fair Trading as they looked into the future of where digital tracking is taking society.

Venue: Room 1019, Building 58a (School of Management Executive Education Centre), University of Southampton, Highfield Campus.

Internet use is so pervasive across society now that using it is considered normal behaviour.  But consumers are surprisingly unaware of how much information about them is collected – either online or offline and how this gets combined.

Currently the main application of this knowledge is to entice you to buy products and services that you otherwise might not have bought.  You use Google but do you realise how much they know about you?  German authorities are so concerned they have just told Google to stop tracking website visitors without their consent.

In the UK we seem less anxious.  But privacy and the data about you that companies capture and sell on to others will become a hot topic.  Not least because of the business opportunity this represents for the legal profession.

Date: Thursday 28th January 2010. 6pm Registration, 6.30pm Presentation, 8pm finish.

To book your FREE place please email busdev@soton.ac.uk with your contact details and numbers of seats you wish to reserve.

Next week I am running a guest session with the MSc Strategic Entrepreneurship students at the University of Southampton on the subjects of entrepreneurial marketing and personal branding. Here are the slides:

The key theme of this session is the growing importance of entrepreneurial skills in developing the profile of an individual or a small business in order to ‘stand out from the crowd’. Increasingly, these skills can be showcased online through blogging and social networking.

One of our objectives for 2010 is to integrate the development of online communication and networking skills more effectively into our programmes, through the vehicle of personal development portfolios (PDP) which we are trialling this year. We will be reporting on our progress at the Association for Learning Technology’s Conference (ALT-C) in September.

Recently my colleague Christophe Mues asked me to talk to his new Information Systems MSc students about my research interests. Little did I know when I agreed to this, that pulling a number of semi-connected threads together of my work over the past 3 years would take up much of this lovely sunny day…and evening…

I thought the above video would help to set the scene, before I launched into this set of slides (sorry, I know it is boring old powerpoint, but now I’ve got the content organised I will work on a prezi version…and also maybe a mindmap)  It was actually a very useful exercise to pull this material together, even if it did make my brain ache.

I’d be delighted to get some feedback from the group in the form of comments on this post, or as tweets during the session on Wednesday(using #researchbylisa), and I will update the post with my reflections afterwards. Let me know if any aspects are of particular interest, (or not) and I will be sure to include them (or not) in the IS strategy module I’ll be running in February

PS – here is another relevant video from Social Media and Open Education that I’d like to show and discuss in the session, if time permits:

Alan and I tried out some new stuff for the University of Southampton Marketing DNA ‘taster course’ series the other night. You can view the slides here:

Mark Cahill has written an interesting post claiming that some of the ‘sacred cows’ of building blog readership are becoming less relevant:

1. The value of trackbacks has been destroyed by spammers
2. Technorati has now been overtaken by Google Blog Search as the key source of linking information.

He suggests that this new world requires a new strategy: a focus on depth of reader engagement rather than counting the volume of passing eyeballs, and the encouragement of links, links and more links.

Here is a summary of Mark’s excellent action list:

Content – create compelling content and more open calls to discussion.

Linking - provide more links to people writing on the same issues.

Value - find ways to provide better value to the reader.

Understand the readership – think more about what the market really desires than simply writing for yourself.

To develop community, use community - spend more time reading and commenting on other blogs in your sphere of influence, using your url in your signature.

Increase post volume – increase the number of interesting tidbits on which you comment.  Not every post needs to be a definitive guide on a subject.

Social networking – don’t forget to direct blog posts into Facebook and Twitter, but without inundating your network with overly specialist material J

More community – get more involved in communities where you will be in front of people whom your blog is written for.  Social networking should lead to more face to face marketing opportunities, not less!

Dive deep into Google – use the free analytics tools to find out what is going on, and then make changes as required.

No doubt this list will look very different again a year from now, but that makes it all so much more fun!