The Sun have thrown their hat into the ring to support the Tories in the next General Election. Today they have gone as far as taking ad words targeted to keywords including ‘Gordon Brown’. Simple, yet effective.

The travelling bug has returned. After enjoying the summer ensconsed in Suffolk, I am delighted to be contributing to, and attending some great events during the Autumn.

October: Social Media in Business. London

This looks to be a great conference and I am delighted to be hosting a discussion panel on ‘the future’ which will be fantastic. You can read my earlier post about it here, or visit the conference page here.

November: Golden Dove DM 2.0. Budapest

I had the privilege of speaking at last year’s Golden Dove (you can see the presentation here) and I am delighted to be invited back. The Golden Dove conference is the leading DM conference in Hungary and across Eastern Europe. What I like about this conference is that Hungary, and most of Eastern Europe is still advancing in its use of web 2.0. The size and reach of social media and consumption of channels like Twitter is some way behind the UK so it makes interesting work to explain what is happening and what will happen abroad, and how they can harness it. I am still working on my talk outline so it is, as yet, untitled. No doubt you’ll hear about it when I start writing. www.goldedove.hu

December: Le Web. Paris

Ah Le Web. Two years ago, I went to Le Web 3 in Paris and found it to be better than anything I had seen on the West Coast USA. More forward thinking speakers, more content and more people to speak to. I guess, unlike Ad Tech or SES, Le Web has a lot less ‘agency’ people and a lot more of the people I connect with on Twitter, FriendFeed etc. So I am delighted to be going back. I’m not speaking, but look forward to sucking up the atmosphere, connecting with others and generally enjoying myself.

The great thing about all these conferences is that, for once, I have nothing to sell. I am not working, I’m not seeking employment but I still love the topics, so I can go and enjoy myself and hopefully learn something along the way.

See you there?

I am blessed to live in such a wonderful part of the country. The weather this year has been wonderful, if a little too dry. This weekend we were blessed with a beautiful autumn weekend, wonderfully sharp colours and muted tones. Perfect for dogs, chickens and photographs!

I recently ordered a new Dell laptop (for my sins) and was ‘delighted’ to receive this notification today,

Your Dell Order is scheduled to arrive between 08:00 and 18:00 on the 25/09/2009. Please arrange for someone to be there throughout this time – as we cannot be more specific about the time of delivery.

As your order is already on its way we regret it’s too late to change the following details:

1.      delivery date
2.      delivery address
3.      order details

So I don’t have any options but to put aside the whole day on the off chance my Dell package will arrive. I am sure Dell will tell me its the delivery company and not them that are making me wait, but in this day and age, with accurate GPS can you not even give me a hint?

I am fascinated by the economy of China – the sheer scale of its growth, production and consumption (OK, and pollution) makes it set to be the world’s next Superpower in my opinion. The Economist magazine ran a great cover on China back in March.

I loved the cover, both aesthetically and figuratively representing China’s perceived view of the world (Europe for Luxury brands, Latin America for mining). By pure coincidence I read this blog article today, “The Most Controversial Magazine Covers of all Time” which included this magazine cover from The New Yorker

Spot the similarity? Now, according to the blog article,

This portrayal of a New Yorker’s idea of what the rest of the United States looks like was drawn by Saul Steinberg. The artist sued Columbia Pictures over their movie poster for “Moscow on the Hudson”, which does seem to be derived from Steinberg’s cover down to the placement of the title. Steinberg won the case.

Which looked like this…

And of course, Russia was a superpower once. Not sure that has any relevance to the three pictures but I’m struggling for a wrap up line.

I am delighted to have been invited to chair the final panel at the Social Media in Business Conference on the 23rd October. The conference looks set to be an excellent ‘injection’ of social media knowledge, best practice and expertise from people who are actually doing this.

What interested me about this conference was that the speakers were not the usual ‘run of the mill’ speakers or agencies you see at Ad Tech, Internet World etc. – for me this means there will be some fresh approaches, fresh opinions and hopefully no show reels!

To quote the official blurb,

The conference examines how social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, are having a major impact on business practices and culture. How can these tools be utilised, how can you employ strategies within your company to increase profitability, sustain reputation and empower your employees to be brand ambassadors. Indeed should you employ internal social networks within your own organisation as a means of facilitating a sharing community amongst your employees, or should you use public open platforms?

These tools can be highly disruptive to any company and are changing the fabric of communications through PR and marketing, you can no longer sit back and watch this unfold, you need strategies in place, you need to know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it.

I will be hosting a panel discussion bringing together a summary of social media in business and predictions for the future at the end of the day. I believe there are a few tickets remaining but they are shifting fast. See you there?

You can also follow @audio on Twitter for the latest news of the conference.

I have to admit to a love of Infographics, the combination of great visuals and information is wonderful. I wish I could create my own infographics. Until then I will have to keep stealing other people’s.

Did you see this infographic from Wired last year?  – The evolution of Apple.

Or how about the truth about Twitter, from www.informationisbeautiful.net

Finally, a more important infographic, taken from GOOD: how much water do we use and how we can save water in our daily lives.

And finally,Röyksopp took infographics into a music video – wonderful, but they won’t let me embed it Here it is.

Today I am asking you to send me a postcard. I have launched a new site called ‘Please Send me a Postcard‘ and I need  your help!

Some time ago, I had an idea of asking people to send me a postcard with one travel tip. I then scan the postcard and write up the tip. I thought [and still think] that if I got enough postcards this could be an interesting site which coupled UGC, travel and the lovely world of offline. If I was in a PR spinner I may call this a

Social Media, Offline UGC Driven Travel Mashup

but I’m not so please can you send me a postcard? [hang on, I quite like that tag - you may see that on twitter very soon!]. I wrote a longer post on the site itself about what I want to do and how it works. The hardest part for you is finding a postcard and posting it to me. If you are anything like me, you haven’t sent one for some time.

The site is still in its infancy, I have a few postcards to post from people I have talked to and I still have quite a bit of work to do on the site design but it is enough to get going.

For those of you who know me more closely, I must stress this is just a project for fun. This is not a new business or new money making venture. This interests me and I hope I can make it a success with your help.

Will you send me a postcard, please?

http://www.pleasesendmeapostcard.com

PSMAP
PO Box 906
Ipswich
IP1 9PP

A new report out confirms that Teens don’t tweet. The study from Nielson suggested that only 16% of US teens tweeted.

To quote the Mashable article,

More precisely, Nielsen has compiled data from its NetRatings panel of 250,000 US Internet users and discovered that there are fewer young people on Twitter () than on the Internet as a whole: one quarter of US Internet users are under 25, Nielsen says, but only 16% of Twitter users lie in that age range. While Nielsen is only measuring people who visit Twitter.com (not desktop and mobile clients), the analytics firm additionally claims that over 90% of TweetDeck () users are over 25, making it unlikely that there are masses of uncounted young people on third-party Twitter apps.

The Onion, always ready with an opinion, took a street survey to see what others think..

As I am not a teen, I tweet a lot. www.twitter.com/jamieriddell

Related articles by Zemanta

• Teens Don’t Tweet… Or Do They? (futurelab.net)
• Twitter not so popular with the young people (arstechnica.com)
• Seriously, Do Teens Tweet? (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Stats Confirm It: Teens Don’t Tweet (mashable.com)

I was delighted to receive this letter in the post. As an RAC member, I had opted not to receive any further promotional literature about other RAC services.

The letter I received noted that I had asked not to receive such information and that “normally we wouldn’t but…” OK STOP. but…? You either respect my wishes or you don’t?

Click for larger image

The letter then goes on to advise me that their ‘carefully selected panel’ will find me the cheapest car insurance price and that if I need anything just call.

So, it looks like a marketing message, it smells like a marketing message….. It is a marketing message !

Good thing they respect my wishes. What next, “well, we usually come and get you from the side of the road, but….”