Mr Capello, get behind the boys!

It’s world cup time again soon, and with it will no doubt come a shed load of football songs aiming to capture the mood of the nation. But this time it’s slightly different, there is NO official England song.

John Barnes is apparently coming out of retirement to start rapping again, El Tel is doing some schmoozy rat-pack number, but that’s about it. Step forward an initiative setup by NorthernNet to showcase their network of media access bureaus across the North of England.

The Old Chapel Studios in Leeds, home to local bands such as the Kaiser Chiefs and The Pigeon Detectives, were contacted by NorthernNet to find a band interested in recording their very own world cup song to represent the North.  Local lads, The Defenders, stepped up to the mark with an instant classic…Mr Capello.

The band are well known to me, as the guitarist and singer is in fact my brother Chris. So it’s exciting to think that it’s going to get some exposure in the coming months. The song has been recorded in a top notch studio, and the video is in production at the moment. As part of this, the production company involved, Magic If, have set up a facebook group that encourages people to record themselves signing along to a snippet of the song.

So if you fancy being in a music video, join the group and follow the instructions!

In the meantime, check out my eldest daughter getting well into it!

My thoughts on Google Buzz

So Google have well and truly entered the world
of social media.

It was to be expected. It’s a bold strategic move to compete directly with newly designed Facebook, who have reworked their user interface to look and act much more like an email inbox. But who is Buzz targeted at?

Obviously, gmail users will be quick to adopt as it will be added automatically to their account. But the masses are much less likely to change their webmail provider than they are to adopt a new independent social network, so is it ever going to achieve widespread usage?

I’ve watched the above video from Google, and to be honest my instant reaction was…well…meh. It simply looks a lot like Friendfeed/Facebook, so how is it going to differentiate itself? what’s the big deal?

Well, to state the obvious, Google’s strength is in search. It’s search results pages are also going social, we know that for sure (enter link). So this raises some interesting questions. Will content aggregated by Buzz be given any form of priority? Will users profiles be highlighted in any way?

I can personally foresee a future where when searching a topic on Google it will return not only site listings, but a list of the key influencers around your search term.

For that reason, I’m going to dip my toes in and keep on top of any future developments.

I’d never be stupid enough to underestimate the power of search.

Crush it – Gary Vaynerchuk – book review

This book came to my attention via a colleague of mine (@mspownall) who sent a link to a competition on the e-consultancy website. I’d never heard of the book, or the author, but e-consultancy is a trusted resource of mine so I entered it. All I had to do was explain what my passion was.

I sent an email:

My passion is…divided. Work/life balance is very important to me, so family always comes first. Parenting is a hugely rewarding challenge, especially when you have 3 children at the age of 28! Professionally I thrive collaborating on exciting, innovative products and campaigns for a variety of clients.

Anyway, a few days later I received an email with the subject line WINNER. Bonus! Another few days went by and the book landed on my desk. A signed version no less. Queue the questions from everyone in the office asking who the hell Gary Vaynerchuk was.

“No idea” was my reply.

But hey, what better way to find out than stick my nose in on my daily travels to and from work!

It turns out Gary is a the epitome of the American dream. And was recently listed in the top 10 internet entrepreneurs of the moment.

Born in Bosnia (or Serbia, I can’t remember) he moved over to America when he was a young lad, and eventually ended up working at his fathers liquor store. He’d always had an entrepreneurial instinct but working day in day out in a liquor store has it’s limits.

Then the spark happened.

Gary discovered the Internet.

There are lots of similar stories out there, granted, but Gary’s sheer enthusiasm for the power of the Internet, and belief in following and promoting the one thing you are truly passionate about really struck a chord with me. He also stresses the importance of personal branding, and delivers some great insight into how to promote yourself whilst remaining true to your personality. He is a family man, like myself, and it is refreshing to hear that you can put family first, but still ‘crush it’.

Anyway, this lad Gary really knew his stuff when it came to wine, so he set up a video blog, pimped himself all over forums and the social web, and Winelibrary.tv was born.

The hard work didn’t stop there though. His straight forward language and abrasive style really caught on, and his sheer determination and effort to engage fully with customers and prospective viewers/ customers very quickly made him his fortune.

He now runs a consultancy firm that guides businesses on how to reap rewards from the Internet.

It’s a really easy to read book. Gary’s personality really comes across and his advice is spot on.

Passion + hard work + good use of online tools = success

Simple as.

You can buy the book from Amazon or if you want further views email me at mail@kevcharlton.com – (tip from Gary, include your email address as often as you can )

Micro-blogging within businesses

Since being given the responsibility of managing a team in my current role at fuse8 I’ve been thinking of ways we can interact, share ideas, and generally keep each other updated about what we’re working on, other than face to face meetings (you can’t beat those! – although they’re not always practical). As a test I decided to start using what has been labelled ‘Twitter for Business’, Yammer.

At work we’ve always relied on email and MSN, so basically you get a lot of emails containing links, location updates, invitations to nights out etc etc, all amongst the stuff that matters….work. MSN just adds to the interruption with people expecting instant responses, meaning concentration can soon become a pretty much impossible task. So I was worried that Yammer would just add to the noise, and end up distracting people and harming these concentration levels.

The initial testing group consists of me and 5 of my team. These include an Information Architect, Concept Director, User interface developer, HTML coder and an SEO consultant. Some were avid Twitter users, a couple of them don’t use it at all. So…a mixed bag. It’ll give me an idea whether using Yammer would work across the whole company…the suits, the hardcore developers and even the creatives. I started by introducing it to the team as an experiment in the hope that the actual usage of the tool would give us a good insight into how it could work. The results so far have been very positive.

It’s proved a good way of team members updating other’s what we’re working on. We all work in for a digital full service agency, so everything is relevant to everyone, meaning everyone can have input. There have been several occasions so far where we’ve collaborated on a project which we wouldn’t have done in the past, and ended up improving the output. It’s also helped keep track of where people are. In the past I might have popped into a meeting, and if someone was away making a cuppa they wouldn’t know where I was. Now they do.

To share articles, inspirational websites, and videos we all use Delicious, but people still send links around via group email. It’s just a quicker way to get everyone looking at something you think is interesting. On Yammer I can share links with an individual (via private messages), group, or all of the team. You can also integrate it with Google Reader. Also, just like Twitter, Yammer has it’s own iphone app, and also works via SMS. So if someone’s gonna be late in, they just Yammer it. Easy as.

All in all, it’s still early days. It’s a test to see if it really could change the way the whole company communicates. I’m fairly optimistic that it will.

Ed – Since writing this I’ve found this great article on The Economist – worth a read.