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.

Back here in Britain, I realised that we were in danger of swamping new readers with a torrent of updates, and that’s where Storify is brilliant. In less than an hour I was able to drag and drop video, tweets, and Facebook updates in to an easy to read edited highlights telling the story of the event. I *heart* Storify.

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 years was 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.

For those who did, I’m glad you enjoyed it too!

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.

This is a rough but hopefully comprehensive guide to getting the enterprise open source Content Management System Mysource Matrix up and running on an Amazon EC2 Cloud virtual computer instance.

The bulk of this guide consists of a  list of commands to be executed in order. Comments appear in red.

It may turn out that not all of these commands are necessary, some may even contradict each other. But they do work, which is more than can be said for some other MySource Matrix installation guides!  Grateful thanks to Squiz and Matrix Stuff for providing all the key instructions necessary to get up and running on EC2.

Log in to / sign up to Amazon Web Services

• Go to Amazon Web Services and sign up for the EC2 elastic computing service.
• Follow the instructions in the service to launch a new instance – a new ‘virtual computer’
• When you want to launch an instance, you are given a number of options.  Select the official Amazon “LAMP web starter”. A small instance with default kernel settings is adequate – so just accept the default settings as you go through.
• When the instance has launched, click on it, look at the details and make a note of the ‘Public DNS’ name (eg ec2-79-125-43-125.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com)
• Connect to the newly launched instance using SSH. Selecting the instance and clicking ‘connect’ will provide the command necessary for Linux and Mac users. Sorry Windows users, I haven’t tried it on your platform yet.

Step 1: Install “pine” (This step is not essential for confident Linux users, but the instructions below assume you are using the pico text editor, which is part of pine)

Execute the following commands. Each bullet point is one command. Copy & paste it in and hit return after each command:

• wget ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine-4.64-1.i386.rpm
• rpm -ivh –nodeps pine-4.64-1.i386.rpm

Step 2: Install the postgresql database server and start it up

Execute the following commands:

• yum -y update
• yum -y install postgresql postgresql-server php-pgsql
• /sbin/service postgresql initdb
• /sbin/service postgresql start

Step 3: Create the database MySource Matrix will use

Execute the following commands:

• su postgres
• createuser -SRDU postgres matrix
• createuser -SRDU postgres matrix_secondary
• createdb -U postgres -O matrix -E SQL_ASCII mysource_matrix
• createlang -U postgres plpgsql mysource_matrix
• psql
• grant all on database mysource_matrix to matrix_secondary
• \q
• exit

Step 4: Install PEAR packages and PHP postgresql support

Execute the following commands. More experienced Linux users  may consider these commands to be in the wrong order or arbitrarily split up… I’m sure you’re right. I only know they work. I’m sorry if what appears below causes you pain.

• yum -y install gcc
• yum -y install php php-pear php-pgsql
• yum -y install php-bcmath php-gd php-mbstring php-tidy php-xml php-pear-Mail php-pear-Mail-Mime
• pear upgrade-all
• pear install XML_HTMLSax XML_Parser Text_Diff
• pear install DB Archive_Tar Mail Mail_Mime Mail_Queue HTTP_Request HTTP_Client Net_URL
• pear install channel://pear.php.net/Image_Canvas-0.3.2
• pear install channel://pear.php.net/Image_Graph-0.7.2
• pear install Numbers_Roman
• pear install channel://pear.php.net/Numbers_Words-0.16.2
• pear install MDB2
• pear install I18N_UnicodeNormalizer-1.0.0
• yum -y install tidy poppler poppler-utils
• wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/antiword/antiword-0.37-3.el5.rf.i386.rpm
• rpm -ivh antiword-0.37-3.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Step 5: Kill web server and restart

The instance starts up with a web server that can’t apparently be stopped with the /sbin/service command, so kill all the processes and restart the server using the /sbin/service command. The exact process numbers may differ for you – we are killing all processes called ‘/usr/sbin/httpd -f /home/webuser/helloworld/conf/httpd.conf’ Execute the following commands:

• kill -9 1938 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951
• /sbin/service httpd start

Step 6: Download Matrix and install

At the time of writing this section downloads the most recent version of Mysource Matrix. New versions are released regularly and so you may wish to substitute the filename in the third step for a more recent file from http://matrix.squiz.net/download/mysource-matrix

Execute the following commands:

• mkdir /home/websites
• cd /home/websites
• wget http://matrix.squiz.net/__data/assets/file/0017/62009/mysource_3-28-3.tar.gz
• tar -zxvf mysource_3-28-3.tar.gz
• cd mysource_matrix

Step 7

Execute the following commands:

• php install/step_01.php /home/websites/mysource_matrix
• pico data/private/conf/main.inc
• Use arrow keys to navigate to SQ_CONF_SYSTEM_ROOT_URLS paramater, and paste in the Public DNS address of your EC2 instance eg ‘ec2-79-125-43-125.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com’
• Enter a valid email address for SQ_CONF_DEFAULT_EMAIL and SQ_CONF_TECH_EMAIL
• Hold down Control, then press O, then the RETURN key to save the file
• Control + X to exit PICO
• pico data/private/conf/db.inc
• Edit the file so it looks exactly like the values under “Creating a Data Source Name, Version 3.18.x and later” on this page
• Control + O then the RETURN key to save the file
• Control + X to exit PICO

Step 8: Allow Mysource Matrix to access the database

I’m not wild about this section – as I understand it it is allowing any user to access the database, rather than just the users we created above. So ensure in your EC2 security settings that you only allow web and email traffic through the firewall – keep Postgresql’s ports closed.

Execute the following commands:

• pico /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf
• Scroll down to bottom, change all mentions of “ident sameuser” to “trust”
• Control +O then RETURN key to save file
• Control + X to exit PICO
• /sbin/service postgresql restart
• php install/step_02.php /home/websites/mysource_matrix

Step 9: The final stage of the MySource Matrix installation wizards

Execute the following commands:

• php install/compile_locale.php /home/websites/mysource_matrix
• php install/step_03.php /home/websites/mysource_matrix
• php install/compile_locale.php /home/websites/mysource_matrix
• chmod -R 755 /home/websites/mysource_matrix
• chown -R apache:apache data cache
• chmod -R g+w data cache

Configure Apache

• pico /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
• Scroll down to end of file (Pressing CTRL+V will page down rather than going line by line) and copy & paste the config below in at the end of the file (change server.example.com to your Amazon Public DNS entry)
• When complete:
  • Control +O then RETURN key to save file
  • Control + X to exit PICO

APACHE CONFIG

—- COPY BELOW THIS LINE —–

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName server.example.com
DocumentRoot /home/websites/mysource_matrix/core/web
Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks
<Directory /home/websites/mysource_matrix>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all

</Directory>
<DirectoryMatch “^/home/websites/mysource_matrix/(core/(web|lib)|data/public|fudge)”>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</DirectoryMatch>
<FilesMatch “\.inc$”>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all

</FilesMatch>
<LocationMatch “/(CVS|\.FFV)/”>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</LocationMatch>

Alias /__fudge   /home/websites/mysource_matrix/fudge
Alias /__data    /home/websites/mysource_matrix/data/public
Alias /__lib     /home/websites/mysource_matrix/core/lib
Alias /          /home/websites/mysource_matrix/core/web/index.php/

</VirtualHost>

——STOP COPYING ABOVE THIS LINE——————

Apply the new configuration

• /sbin/service httpd restart

Configure Matrix

Matrix itself is now up and running, and ready to be configured.

In your web browser, go to your EC2′s public DNS address, and login to Matrix - eg:

http://ec2-79-125-43-125.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/_admin/

Login as root, with username root and password root, then:

• In Asset Tree, expand System Administrator folder
• Right click on Root User and click Details
• Click ‘acquire locks’
• Reset password and click Commit

Create website

• Right click anywhere in asset tree
• Select  New Child > Web > Site
• Select location in asset tree (anywhere on top level) and click. Click create here.
• Give name and click commit
• Right-click on your newly created website in the asset tree and click on URLS, then aquire locks
• In empty URL box paste in public DNS address (eg something like ec2-79-125-43-125.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com)
• Tick HTTP and click Commit
• Right click website, New Child > Pages > Standard Page
• Call the page Home, and Commit
• Right click the website (NOT the page you just created) and click Details, then aquire locks
• Under the heading Special Index Page links, find ‘Index’ and click the ‘Change’ button to select the ‘Home’ page you just created (Click change, right click on the home page in the asset explorer and click ‘use me’). This sets your site’s homepage. Click Commit.
• Edit content of home page, type ‘hello world’ and commit
• Go to your public DNS address in a browser – eg http://ec2-79-125-43-125.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/ – and you will see ‘Hello world’

Your system is basically now up and running. The whole site is secure as you have not yet set public access permissions. It will look rough as you have not yet uploaded a design or theme. This is outside the scope of this guide, but you can find sample designs (and installation instructions) here.

I hope you’ve found this guide useful, if a little unpolished!

This year’s Association for Cultural Enterprises annual convention included a number of workshop strands with the strap ’10 things you need to know but never dared ask’ – my thanks to the delegates who chose to attend my session on the digital world. 45 minutes isn’t long to squeeze in ten things, but we made it!

Thanks to Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications, Deirdre Molloy at the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and Mark Pack of Mandate for inspiring different parts of the presentation.

Presentation, with annotations

Below you’ll find a copy of my slide deck, with some explanatory notes added in red.
The digital world: ten things you need to know but never dared ask

You can also download a PDF of the presentation (12MB PDF) without annotations.

More reading

I promised some links to useful websites and agency suggestions, so here is my starter for ten:

Word of Mouth agencies

• We Are Social
• 1000heads

Digital strategy and web service agencies

• Chameleon Net
• Fortune Cookie
• Precedent

Online video production

• Christian Payne (documentally)

Measurement

• bit.ly
• Google Analytics
• Google Insights for Search
• Icerocket
• How to use YouTube Insight

A quick plug for a presentation by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications on the merits or otherwise of corporate blogging, which includes a contribution from your local blogger here.

I’ll be speaking at the annual convention of the Association for Cultural Enterprises next week – if you work in that sector and fancy a session which will involve PowerPoint but also the collective creation of a small piece of social marketing collateral (despite warnings not to rely on an internet connection!), then do come along.

Google is currently testing a new search interface, which could among other things have an impact on recruitment to metropolitan universities.

One of the major factors for students who choose to study at a metropolitan university, particularly those living in London, is the proximity of the University to their home. These students are more likely than most to search for a specific institution by name, as they may be familiar with it having been exposed to the brand through advertising / signage / events.

If you search for the University of Westminster on the current Google interface, you will see a first hit that looks similar to this:

Under the new Google interface, the map is no longer included in the first search result. However, further down the page a contextual map is included:

I can’t quite believe this map is intended not to give prominence to the University of Westminster, given that those were my search terms. However at present, this is a slot of our ‘shop window’ dedicated to our competitors, without the need for PPC advertising. A big change, with a particular relevance in areas where multiple institutions are packed in close together - so yet another London factor for student recruitment.

It comes round so regularly you could set an incredibly slow clock by it – the question “will the next election be the Internet election?”

It’s impossible to answer that question without first defining what an “Internet election” is. Traditionally to my mind there have been two possible definitions:

1. An election where a stasticically significant number of seats, ten or more, change hands either as the direct result of online campaigns by political parties candidates, or because positive online campaigning was a critical factor.
2. An election where any number of MPs, as low as a single MP, is undeniably ousted from their seat by a negative campaign either by political opponents or independent critics, mustered online.

But a third possibility is emerging.

My belief is that when we look back on the General Election of 2010, for all the effort poured in to them the defining story will not come from My Conservatives, or the Liberal Democrats’ soon to be launched competitor, Act.

It could come from a signature pre-planned campaign. If, for example, the TaxPayer’s Alliance aren’t working right now on a postcode searchable system in which voters can see what their sitting MP has claimed on expenses, and what their opponents have said their approach to expenses will be, then they need to sack the person responsible for their digital effort and re-hire quickly.

More likely, the defining online moment of GE2010 will come from Twitter.  Watch this short video before you go any further:

The video shows Twitter’s trending topics for October 13 2009. It shows the clear emergence of the #trafigura hashtag as the dominant topic of conversation in just three hours – an explosion aided by (cough) people like me keeping the tag alive overnight from about 10pm on the 12th. They weren’t just any hours either, but the awkward hours at the start of the working day – 08:00 to 10:00 where people are still drifting in to work, and an organisation isn’t at its peak responsiveness.

Millions discussed Trafigura on Twitter. By the time Trafigura hired someone who understood social media, just three days later on October 16th, their staid YouTube response was only able to garner a few hundred views. Many simply weren’t interested in the story any more, and those who were interested weren’t inclined to help the company out by passing on the existence of the video. They’d burned millions of bridges with millions of people, simply by being slow to react.

Every party, and every candidate, has to decide now whether they’re going to understand and engage with social media, or fear it. It’s a nightmare for political parties to get their heads around – social media has no respect for constituency or regional boundaries, no understanding of the need for parties with complex structures to navigate their internal democratic processes before they pronounce, and in particular, no mercy for those who cannot respond somehow, in some way, immediately.

If the parties haven’t understood it already, they need to now. The General Election of 2010 is already the Internet election – the power of one foolish remark by a tired key figure, amplified by Twitter, could cause your national campaign to implode if you aren’t ready. There is no choice whether or not to engage online, the playing field has been swapped from under the feet of the political parties while their attention was focused on the Lobby.

Purely in terms of defending against the threat of social media, irrespective of embracing the opportunities, if parties haven’t already done the following, they need to move quickly:

• Don’t think that reading Guido Fawkes’ blog is the same as monitoring the web – treat Guido just as you would a journalist from the mainstream media. In terms of influence his blog is as mainstream a media outlet as The Telegraph online. Engage him as you would any other hostile journalist. And Guido’s not alone – have a list of bloggers with a similar impact to the MSM.
• Train all your press officers as active participants on Twitter. The Lobby and other key journalists are already there, and will be being fed stories through Twitter constantly.
• Extend your media monitoring teams to set up Twitter searches for ‘@’ replies, so you can see not only what your key targets are saying, but what is being said in reply. Include:
  • Your candidates and their opponents
  • The journalists following your campaigns
  • Key national political media
• Merge / co-locate your digital and media teams, they need to feed information to each other instantly.
• Have a plan for how you’re going to engage on a national level. Where will you be? Who will speak? Look at the polling data – particularly the demographics. Are you better off on Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? Can you cover them all?
• Be ready to create video at short notice. If you’re hit by a critical YouTube video, there’s little point responding on a webpage on your party site.
• Train your local campaigners. Make sure they’re running a reduced version of your national social media monitoring. Ensure that they can quickly alert your national digital team to anything they may have missed. Particularly, but not exclusively, for sitting MPs look at the campaign and ask yourself this – “If I found myself on the receiving end of a Tim Ireland / Anne Milton campaign, would I know how to react?”

And finally, the national parties (and for that matter any large agency, charity, or company) need to examine their usual tactics for handling negative stories, and ask if they still stand up in the age of Wikileaks and Twitter. You can’t injunct them, you can’t cajole them, you can’t bully them, and you can’t deny their voice. You can only engage. Are you ready?