Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I came up with a bunch of different first sentences for this post - but ended up with this lame one because i couldn't decide which to use - potentially they were all lame anyway

• Quiet exuberance hardly describes my emotions…
• I'm off to France - so long suckerssss…
• Say hullo to the new HTC Ambassador…

See what I mean - lame.

Anyway now that that's over let me introduce to you the new HTC Desire S Tour De France Ambassador. Moi!

HTC have selected me to go to France for the last week of the 2011 Tour to be their HTC Desire S Ambassador. What that means is they are giving me an HTC Desire S Android handset and hopefully enough phone credit to go nuts with it over there. I'm to report on the phone and how i use it to keep a daily blog and photos and video of the tour including the awesome Champs Elysees seating package I have. Did i mention its also a cycle tour so i get to manfully (or whimper like a girl) struggle up Alpe D'Huez amongst some other rides including the penultimate days time trial circuit. In addition I get to meet the HTC Highroad team and report on their progress in the tour.

Trepidation, Excitement, Nervous Energy, Adrenalin. Some of the things happening right now. This has been a dream of mine for years. I was planning on going to the Tour Down under next year - but this tops that! No more late nights sitting watching scratchy SBS broadcasts (we live in a poor reception area) - I'm going to be one of those blokes on the side of the road with their shirt off cheering like an absolute idiot as the guys ride by up the Alpe!

Lucky Buggers I used to mutter under my breath. Now I am the Lucky Bugger!

Stay tuned for more.

Follow my tweets on http://twitter.com/spyjournal and facebook at http://www.facebook.com/HTCau?sk=app_251315594884338&app_data=author:tim-miller where my diary posts will be published.

Following on from the success of the www.qldfloods.org website I have been invited to a number of panels, communities and working groups.

Last night I was asked to take some team photos for the Emergency 2.0 Wiki working group committee of which I am a part.

What a comedy of errors!

I set the camera up on the board room table, pointing at the group at the end with the projector screen at the end, set the timer, pushed the button and headed for the end of the table - only to have to leap cables on the way - i made the first tangled in the second and couldn't stop, dragging the laptop running the projector screen to the floor and severing the connection. Thus the photo is of everybody staring at me (to camera left) and laughing - and a purple screen.

The second photo I got there in time, but Eileen decided to lunge for the water bottle at the last second!

After several more spectacular failures including a shot that was ok but with inexplicably a Facebook login screen in the background, we eventually ended up with the desired result. We were all staring at an iPad that had the meeting agenda on it and trying not to giggle!

BuzzGrowl is a pretty cool plugin that's very easy to install on any website. It creates a floating bottom right corner box that searches for and displays social media commentary about the site you are on. It provides easy ways for people to see the commentary about your site and participate by sharing on Facebook, tweeting or retweeting others comments.

I was able to install it in under 5 minutes, its a simple script that needs to be added to your page. Get your script from BuzzGrowl.

Here's some of what people have been saying about it:

BuzzGrowl is a premium answer to onsite social media engagement. If you're a small blog, you'll love it. - Brad McCarty, Editor, TheNextWeb
Many site owners will be interested in using [Buzz Growl]. Website publishers will love it. - Marshall Kirkpatrick, Co-Editor, ReadWriteWeb

And here is a video about it.

Social media integration - its not just about technology - its also about community.

The biggest buzzword on the web right now and in advertising and marketing is social media integration. I am having more and more meetings each week with clients asking how they do this.

We have a lot of technology that we can throw at this to make it easy to work - and the tech stuff is pretty easy. Most of the major players are now providing "open" or at least partially open access to data.

But none of it is any use if you are not able to make the community part work. Integrating your brand marketing and awareness with social media is not like traditional advertising, where you threw stuff out at people and barely listened to feedback it at all. At most my experience with big brand advertising has been that the feedback loop was filtered through ad campaign managers, 3rd party survey random sample providers and the odd bit of internal email dealing with the one or two very angry customers!