We hold a huge, global, annual competition each year at CIMA called the Global Business Challenge. There are several rounds of the competition, culminating in country finals, and then the global final.
This year’s global final is in Chengdu, China. Our team on the ground have been providing a constant stream of social media updates, which my team and I have been gathering, editing, and adding to over the weekend in a Cover it Live embedded on our website and on Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »
Croydon Minster are a lovely community, and it’s always fun to work with those who are passionate about the organisation they belong to and support, so I was pleased to launch croydonminster.org with their support earlier this month.
Video
I particularly enjoyed filming the two-hour long Minster Making service, though condensing it down to a 15 minute highlights video was tricky! Here’s that video:
Technical gubbins
The site runs on a Drupal 7 core, and is a departure from the Parish Church’s site, which was more static. I’ve tried to take across the concise copy and really good navigation from the old site in to the new, while adding new features like online ticket sales, fundraising, and an integrated CRM (CiviCRM).
In its first two weeks the site raised £106 in event ticket sales, which is great for a small site, and has offset the hosting charges (£19 per month VPS from myhosting.com). For the first time the Minster has a Twitter feed, YouTube channel and Audioboo channel, and their established Facebook page is being used more actively. We’re also using Posterous to make things like uploading the weekly newsletter as easy as sending an email.
Moving to Drupal 7 has not been without some pain – important CiviCRM modules like GiftAid and the Theme switching module aren’t yet Drupal 7 compatible. But it’s good to be very future proof at the earliest stage.
Next steps
The Minster community have been involved in supplying ideas and content, and the next step is to hand it back to the community to own it and run it themselves.
All in all it’s been a great project to work on, and there’s one last challenge to overcome – because the VPS is based in the US, it’s natural SEO for UK searchers isn’t strong. So it’s no coincidence you find me blogging about Croydon Minster, yes, that’s Croydon Minster, at croydonminster.org.
It was great to be asked to make a return visit to the Association for Cultural Enterprises Annual Convention earlier this year. ACE is the UK’s largest network of heritage commerce professionals – the people who make money for the museums, galleries and other institutions which we enjoy like churches and even parliament.
ACE asked me to speak to the session title “social media hysteria” – now a few months have passed I can share my presentation from the day, and it’s really pleasing to see my big prediction – search is changing and becoming social – really starting to come true in the last few months.
If you follow my Twitter timeline you may know that on each day of Advent I posted a video of a piece of choral music, in a series of blog posts tagged Choral Christmas.
I had an idea that this time of year was a perfect opportunity to share some of the music I enjoy – Christmas music and non-Christmas, sacred and secular. It also became an opportunity to find some new music. All told, about three days worth of effort went in to the series – watching, researching, writing blog posts, and occasionally recording an Audioboo or two. Each selected video was put in to a blog post, and scheduled to be posted each day. As it went up, an automated tweet was posted to Twitter, which was the main means of promoting the posts.
So was it worth it? Measured in terms of conventional web analytics, that has to be a big fat no. If I’d spent three solid days throwing eggs at passers-by I would have made greater impact (!), reaching many more people.
All told the posts averaged between five and fifteen views each, predominantly from clicks on the auto Twitter posts. Moving the posting time back an hour from 9am GMT to 10AM GMT had no noticeable effect. Unsurprisingly, the posts which did slightly better were those where I was a emotive in the subject line – The spine-tingling return of I Fagiolini performed best with 44 clicks over nine days, though I later chose to remove the much overused “spine-tingling” from the headline.
As the post titles were deliberately kept under 140 characters, they are not very well set up for ongoing search engine optimisation, so now the series has concluded I may go back and rewrite more titles with a view to Google rather than Twitter.
So was it a total waste of time then?
No. Not at all. In terms of conventional analytics it wasn’t a roaring success, but it was very satisfying to do, for a number of reasons:
The tweet advertising the Perotin post Rewind 800 yearswas favourited on Twitter by a couple of people, an understated gesture that they have enjoyed, or will enjoy later, your writing. Other posts also received favourites.
The return of I Fagiolini post attracted the attention of the ensemble leader, who wrote a full, informative comment enriching my understanding of a performance which I had loved, even if I had not entirely understood it.
Several people replied on Twitter to individual posts saying how much they had enjoyed them. Twitter comments lead me to change the final days selections.
As well as posting up favourites of mine, I discovered new music, and new performers, through clicking on related videos in YouTube. For example, though I knew the piece well, Voces8′s performance (and Voces8 themselves) of O Clap Your Hands was so enjoyable I played it on a loop for hours. I’ll very likely go and see Voces8 in concert as a result.
Next time, and I think there will be a next time, I will think through the promotion of the posts a bit more to see if the average number of views can be raised a bit. But on balance, I’m happy. As a series of posts it didn’t set the world alight, but it was a learning experience, it appealed to a few people and started a satisfying number of conversations, and it was an opportunity to listen to hours of great music.
At CIMA I’ve introduced an HD quality Sony HVR-A1E camera to our comms and marketing arsenal, as we branch out in to online video. This latest video saw our senior web editor Kate in charge of the camera, and I did the interviewing and editing / post-production. I’ve been editing in Final Cut Express on a MacBook Pro.
“Meet the new members” – a video to encourage CIMA students to progress with the qualification
After every set of exam results there are always some students who haven’t made the grade on that occasion, and this video will be drawn on at that time to hopefully act as small inspiration, and give an insight in to how those who have made it all the way feel rewarded, and how they have found the qualification useful. The filming took place in the beautiful garden of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, London.
