Real Fresh TV | Specialists in Social Commerce and Social Media Marketing » Your Opinion, Please

How Can I Help You? What Problem Are You Trying To Solve?

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:29:08 +0000

Inspired by a recent article by digital analyst and sociologist Brian Solis, I’ve been going through our service offering at Real Fresh TV and realised that I don’t ask our customers, blog readers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers enough!

It boils down to this:

As a business, we exist to demonstrate how social media enables progress on business priorities and objectives.

If I don’t know what your business priorities and objectives are, I can’t help you.

Social media is unique in allowing true product or service co-creation. For example, if you tweet requesting a service I can deliver, it’s up to me to ensure we work together.

The beauty of this approach is that we can save you a lot of time! Rather than spending days working out whether or not a Twitter profile or Facebook presence will help achieve a business objective, you save time and resources by allowing us to demonstrate when and how it can.

It’s an approach that has worked well with a wide range of clients, from Gate Films to Clock Creative to Arts Council England.

The catch is:

We need to know what you want.

The more I know what you’re trying to achieve with your Twitter account or Facebook presence or company blog, the more likely you are to achieve it because, as the attendees of the Manchester Social Media Surgery can attest, I love to help!

So, how can I help you?

What problem are you trying to solve?

Image credit: Napier.ac.uk

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Poll: What would you like to see more of at a Manchester Social Media Surgery?

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:49:11 +0000

Did you attend our last event?

Please take a minute to take part in this quick poll and let us know what you’d like to see more of at a Manchester Social Media Surgery event. Cheers!

Leave a comment and get a Twitter recommendation!

On Friday I’ll be recommending one person who attended the Surgery every hour on Twitter from those leave a comment below. Please include your Twitter handle in the comment! Thank you.

If you have any other comments/queries about the Manchester Social Media Surgery events, please share in the comments below.

Free Ticket Giveaway: WordCamp UK, 18-19 July, 2009

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:50:54 +0000

I’m giving away a free ticket to attend WordCamp UK 2009, the WordPress UK Conference in July. Read on to find out why!

It’s been an absolute pleasure to be involved in the planning for the second ever WordCamp UK conference.

WordCamp UK is the informal annual gathering of WordPress publishers, designers and developers based in the UK. This year it is taking place in Cardiff, Wales, on the weekend of 18-19 July 2009.

WordPress is a very popular content management system (CMS) regularly used by bloggers world over as the open source platform of choice for a blog. This site is proudly powered by WordPress and joins thousands of others around the UK running the platform.

Back in the summer of 2007 when I was considering CMS platforms for a re-launched Real Fresh TV website, I came across a little known South African freelance WordPress developer called Adii who worked with me to develop the current version of the Real Fresh TV site.

He has since gone on to greater things including the launch of his company, radiiate, and the very successful WordPress theme design business, WooThemes.

I’m proud to have been involved in popularising the WordPress platform in some way in the UK and jumped at the opportunity to support the growing community of WordPress developers up and down the country.

WordPress powers sites for the great (number10.gov.uk) and the good (twestival.com). Number10.gov.uk is the Prime Minister’s website. Twestival.com was a series of tweetups around the world that raised money for Charity:Water on 12th February.

I’m helping with the press for WordCamp UK 2009, and have over recent months contributed to the very active WordPress UK list managed by Tony Scott alongside developers Simon Wheatley and Laura Kalbag who have toiled away to develop a bi-lingual WordCamp UK 2009 website. The site’s content will be available in Welsh and English.

There are many more other contributors on the list, sign up if you’re based in the UK and are interested in WordPress development.

I am micro-sponsoring WordCamp UK 2009 and will also be speaking on Building Audience & Community at the event alongside the illustrious Chris Garrett, a well-known UK blogger.

It’s been a delight to watch the plans for the conference come together and I’m particularly excited that WordPress founding developers Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little will be present.

Matt will be discussing current WordPress developments covering both WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Matt is highly respected in web circles not only for developing one of the world’s most popular blogging platforms but for doing it all at the tender age of 20-something. He is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25. Find out more about Matt.

Manchester-based Mike Little who piped up to help Matt develop an open source version of b2, the earlier iteration of the software that became known as WordPress will also be speaking.

Mike recently founded his own independent business providing WordPress-powered web solutions having worked in blue chip IT firms for a very long time.

The early bird registration for the conference is just £25 for the two day event, rising to £35 on 31st May.

Sponsors are still being courted and if you’d like to sponsor WordCamp UK 2009 please take a minute to download the Press and Sponsorship Pack which I helped write!

If you’d like a free ticket to attend WordCamp UK 2009, just leave a comment after this post letting me know what you think of WordPress!

I will select a comment at random and award the lucky commenter a free ticket to WordCamp UK 2009. You are responsible for arranging your transport to Cardiff and your accommodation whilst there.

Speaking of WordPress development, I’ve been busy managing the design and development of the new website for the Arts Council’s AmbITion project, managed by Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA). Obviously, it’s powered by WordPress…

It’s been a pretty hectic few weeks; the site is scheduled to go live in coming days. I’ll be posting more about the new AmbITion website soon.

For other write ups on WordCamp UK 2009, check out posts by Neville Hobson and Jeff Van Campen.

What are you waiting for? Leave me a comment and grab that free ticket to WordCamp UK 2009!

Update:
You have until 9am on Thursday 14th May to enter. Good luck!

Update – Thursday 14th May: We have a winner! Grace Long, your entry was chosen by the Random Number Generator at random.org! Read on to find out more. Thanks for entering all!

Get Your Music Video on YouTube’s Most Viewed List In A Week

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:54:56 +0000

This is a bit of a social media experiment.

A few hours ago, I discovered that if you searched for ‘New Music Videos’ on Google.co.uk, this humble website was the fifth search result returned.

That’s Real Fresh TV’s New Music Videos page, listed higher on Google than MTV UK, NME.com and Channel 4.

Go ahead and try it… hopefully nothing has changed.

Now that might not mean anything to you but it means a lot to me.

This blog may look like something an advertising agency threw together on whim but that has not always been the case.

As you can read here, Real Fresh TV started out in ‘music publishing’.

We used to be an Internet TV portal for new music from around Manchester, UK.

We made Europe’s first live music video podcast, the 3 Minute Gig and we discovered the Ting Tings. Them of Apple iPod Ad fame and number 1 UK album.

OK, make that we filmed the Ting Tings way before they were famous.

Now… what do we do with this remarkable legacy in new UK music discovery…

We advise ad agencies on how to do cool internet marketing campaigns with blogs, podcasts, online communities and web videos.

It was the most sensible way of paying the bills.

Real Fresh TV ranking higher than Channel 4, MTV UK and the NME website for searches for ‘New Music Videos’ completely validates all the unpaid hard work that went into filming all those gigs two years ago. And warms my heart.

Anyway… after picking my jaw up off the floor, I got thinking about how to use this new found notoriety for ‘New Music Videos’ for some good.

Upon finding out after glancing through our Site Meter logs, I tweeted a fellow Manchester blogger (and musician) MartinSFP about my findings, offering to promote his next music video.

He replied by pointing me to his most recent work on YouTube. Which I watched and enjoyed.

This got me thinking.

What if I ran an experiment to see if we could get an unsigned band’s video to the most viewed list on YouTube, normally reserved for recording greats like Avril Lavigne and most of the Universal Music Group’s portfolio of artistes after reviewing them on here.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could use our Google Juice to propel an unsigned band into YouTube’s Hall of Internet Infamy.

I know this is sounding a bit overambitious but hey, anything worth doing is worth doing well.

And if it doesn’t work… Well, I dunno… Whatever. I have nothing to lose.

So here’s the plan.

I am offering a UK-based band the opportunity to get involved in this race for views.

Simply leave a comment here with a link to your video on YouTube. If you have one.

At the end of 7 days, I will pick one video at random. I will review this video and post it on the Real Fresh TV blog on the New Music Videos page.

What This Means
After allowing Google a little time to index the Real Fresh TV site, this band’s video and review will now be returned at the the fifth search result for ‘new music videos’ on Google.co.uk. It will replace the snippet of a review for Vincent Van Go Go’s ‘Do You Know’ video currently showing.

What You Need To Do
Your job then is to

tell your friends that your music video is sitting pretty as the #5 search result for ‘New Music Videos’ on Google.co.uk. Above MTV UK, Channel 4 and NME.com!
ask your friends and fans to get more people to view your video

The whole point of this exercise is to significantly increase the number of views your video received before being reviewed on the Real Fresh TV website.

So, the heat is on.

Send me some links to some cool music videos on YouTube.

The music video must be by an unsigned or indie UK band. Sorry to exclude the ‘rest of the world’ but this search experiment is being limited to Google.co.uk.

Videos with the slightest hint of pornography, racism or violence will be ignored.

If you have any comments or questions, fire away. Be warned, however, music videos will receive more of my attention.

Photo Credit: MCPS-PRS Alliance’s Flickr photostream

UPDATE August 2010:
This experiment ended quite a while ago.

I’d be happy to receive your comments but your time is probably best spent emailing your fans and inviting them to a gig you get paid for or inviting them to download your track off iTunes. All the best.

The 5 Day PUMA Manchester Giveaway

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 26 May 2008 08:00:10 +0000

As part of PUMA’s hunt for Manchester’s most promising music talent, we’re giving away a pair of coveted USAN trainers from PUMA’s Runway Collection.

We’ve also got up for grabs 5 pairs of money-can’t-buy tickets to an exclusive gig featuring hotly tipped grime-disco masters Hadouken! at Manchester’s Moho Live on 17th June.

Also performing will be local bands hand picked by PUMA; if you’re in a Manchester band check out www.pumamanchester.com for details on how to bag a support slot at the gig. Your track may even be used in a PUMA marketing campaign!

To enter the 5-day PUMA Manchester giveaway
Leave a comment answering the following question:

“Who do you think is the most stylish person in the music world?”

That’s it!

To check out Hadouken! visit www.myspace.com/hadoukenuk

Competition Rules

This is a ‘comment contest’. Anyone can enter and anyone can vote on comments entered. Vote by clicking the Thumbs Up icon next to each comment.

Here are the rules:

Only one entry allowed per person.
You can only vote ONCE in the 5-day PUMA Manchester giveaway.
The comment that has the most votes at midnight on Friday 30th May wins!
The competition is open to anyone worldwide, but the tickets and trainers will only be delivered to a UK address. This means you may enter if you live outside the UK but have friends or relatives living in the UK who can take delivery of the prize on your behalf.
The winner must upload a gig review of the PUMA gig (with pictures) within 24 hours of the event.
The review must be published first on the Real Fresh TV website.

Entries can be submitted until 23:59 GMT on Friday 30th May. Entries after that will be ignored.

The winner will be announced at 09:00am on Monday 2nd June.

Good luck!

SMALL PRINT

• As PUMA’s gig on 17th June is in licensed premises, only those aged 18 or over may attend. Winners of this competition aged below 18 years will not be allowed to attend the gig.

• If the prize listed is not available in the winner’s size a PUMA product of an equal or higher value will be given.

• No cash alternative to prizes is available.

UPDATE:
Nathan Keller won the 5 Day PUMA Manchester Giveaway and you can read his review of the Hadouken! gig here.

Disqus Feature Request: A Chance To Monetise?

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:57:01 +0000

I’ve just installed Disqus, a neat blog comment management system on this site, joining over 4000 blogs.

Disqus is a blog comment management system that effectively turns comments on a blog into a community.

I like Disqus because the profile page provided for each commenter at Disqus.com adds an additional level of accountability to each comment, something I think surpasses its ‘threaded comments’ feature which is what initially attracted me to it.

However, as fantastic as it is, Disqus lacks something I really need:

Comment Voting

I’d really like the ability to vote for individual comments within Disqus.

In effect, I’d like to be able to turns comments on certain posts on this blog into competition entries.

This is quite different from allocating reputation points using the Clout Points system already in place on Disqus. This works across the entire Disqus ‘network of blogs’ and would not be an appropriate way to handling voting for individual comments on a particular blog.

Disqus Comment Voting – How It Would Work

Competition entrants enter by leaving a comment on a blog post using Disqus.
Each comment now has a prominent Vote button associated with it.
Entrants vote for their favourite comment.
Each commenter is only allowed ONE vote.
At the end of the competition, the number of votes received by each comment is revealed!

The competition moderator (most likely the author of the blog) is the only person able to see the total number of votes entered for each comment until after a set time (most likely the end of the competition) when it is displayed on the blog.

Here are three mockup images illustrating what I mean:

Voting For Comments in Disqus – Before Vote is Cast

Click to view larger image – Before Vote is Cast

Voting For Comments in Disqus – After Vote is Cast

Click to view larger image – After Vote is Cast

Voting For Comments in Disqus – At The End of The Competition

Click to view larger image – Competition End

Why I Want Comment Voting in Disqus
Regular readers of Real Fresh TV know that our popular re-launch giveaway competition, the first British iPhone giveaway was marred by voter malpractice.

For this particular giveaway, comment voting was provided via Comment Karma, the popular WordPress plugin.

The Problem:
The problem was that people repeatedly voted down entries as they were made. This happened because the voting mechanism in Comment Karma allows either positive or negative votes for each entry.

At one point, pretty much every comment had ‘negative’ points next to it!

To fix this, I had to modify Comment Karma to only allow positive voting, delaying the deadline of the competition several times in the process.

Having said that, the iPhone Giveaway was incredibly popular and I intend to run similar 5 Day Giveaways in coming weeks.

Comment voting via a blog comment management system is something I would consider paying for… DisqusPro anyone?

At the very least, adding it to the free version could make Disqus the defacto commenting plugin within the blogosphere, in my opinion.

The truth is, I could really use comment voting in Disqus because I’m working with a client who needs such a feature. And I’m happy to offer up the Real Fresh TV site as a willing guinea pig.

I have spent a bit of time brainstorming the conditions required in the code and a variety of special cases and would be happy to share those…

Anyone else want something like this?

Disqus, in the comments…

Comment Vote buttons courtesy of MyCoolButton.com

Get involved

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:45:11 +0000

Please get involved with our articles. You can do so in a variety of ways: from suggesting articles for future posts or by providing an alternative point of view.

All responses heartily welcomed, especially contrarian points of view.

What you get in return?

The opportunity to inform and enlighten our readers on this new, fascinating and incredibly important new form of online marketing.
An opportunity to plug your company or product or service to opinion formers and decision makers in the UK’s marketing industry.
The opportunity to plug your company/product/service as often and as much as you’d like without any fear of being thrown out or flamed (i.e. shouted at in derision) by Real Fresh TV*, provided the information is on topic and is not inflammatory and unfair on other commenters in any way.

*Disclaimer: I hasten to add that we cannot predict the actions and opinions of future commenters in response to your comment on this site and will ensure they have the same ‘rights’ to shameless self-promotion as you do, as detailed in the three points above. ;o)

We feel we shouldn’t be held responsible (or made liable) for their actions. Perhaps you disagree? If so, let us know… leave a comment.

Feel free to cast your eye over our Terms and Conditions here.

This is the power of blogging.

Disqus Feature Request: A Chance To Monetise?

Day 7 of the First British iPhone Giveaway

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 02:57:30 +0000

And the ‘negative voting’ saga continues…

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

The highest ‘voted’ entry right now in the first British iPhone giveaway is by Robin, for Battlestar Galactica, at -24 votes. Except that this entry is an update to Robin’s preceding comment which received -23 votes.

Clearly, by not checking for and preventing comment voting abuse, I made a fundamental error in my judgement of how competitors in the iPhone giveaway would use the comment voting tools.

I probably should have taken your advice earlier, Mark Watkins… I am doing now. More on that later.

So… in the final analysis, is it fair to expect competitors in a race to vote for each other? And is it fair to expect competitors in a race to resist the urge to vote down other competitors?

No and no.

I really should have seen it coming. It’s obvious now and I apologise for my naïveté. Another lesson learned.

All this makes me re-evaluate why I decided to do the iPhone giveaway in the first place.

1. To raise the profile of the re-launched Real Fresh TV site.
2. To find out people’s perceptions of watching terrestrial TV content on one of the best portable media players around.

I guess both objectives have been achieved to some degree.

However, I still have this nagging feeling that the competition hasn’t been fair.

So… the giveaway is now morphing into a more general, random one.

You know, the kind we all recognise: a random prize draw.

I will pick an entry at random on Monday 12th Novemebr at 12 noon and award that lucky person the free iPhone.

Many thanks to everyone who has entered the giveaway so far. Your suggestions have made it a genuinely interesting experience.

There’s one more thing though.

There are now two additional criteria for winning.

The winner must be willing to deliver a written review with pictures of their new iPhone to Real Fresh TV within 24 hours of receiving it.

The review must be published first on Real Fresh TV.

I had been meaning to announce this earlier but thought it better to save it till the day the winner was announced. Now I’m announcing it a day earlier.

If that floats your boat and you haven’t entered already … there’s time yet to make a random entry.

Suggest a TV show. It doesn’t matter how many votes it does or doesn’t receive.

It could be you.

Picture credit: TheApplePress.com

________________

Addendum: I decided to scrap the idea of using a simple poll to draw up a short list from the most popular TV shows suggested in the comments because the votes are clearly not reflective of people’s opinion so far.

What would you have done if it were you?

Your thoughts in the comments.

Much appreciated.

Day 4 of the First British iPhone Giveaway

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:22:29 +0000

What a difference a bit of promotion makes!

I contacted Steve who runs the fantastic iPhoneUKLaunch.com site yesterday and he put the word out and sent loads more eager TV and iPhone fans to our iPhone giveaway.

Much appreciated, Steve! We are now up to 50+ entries and some of them have been really interesting despite all the the ‘negative’ voting going on. More on that later.

iPhoneUKLaunch.com has been covering news of the UK’s most highly anticipated consumer gadget since the US iPhone launch back in June. It’s a treasure trove of information on the iPhone and could well become a thriving hub for future UK iPhone users.

I’d keep a hold of the domain name if I were you, Steve. Where else can one read about iPhone baby wear or the camp out already starting on Regent Street in London?

I recommend anyone unable or unwilling to brave it to an Apple store tomorrow evening to keep abreast of developments via iPhoneUKLaunch.com. Should be a fascinating insight into the UK’s impending love affair with the iPhone…

Back to the ‘negative’ voting going on in the first British iPhone giveaway…

I had a feeling people wouldn’t be able to resist voting down other suggestions but not at this scale!

Well, there’s a fairly simple way around it. I’ve decided that a vote is a vote, whether positive or negative.

I will be collating the highest voted entries and putting those through a simple poll tomorrow. This seems to be the fairest way forward.

Each name and email address entered in the poll has been stored against its corresponding entry and what will now follow will be a poll to find out which TV show suggestions the public likes best.

Hang on to your seats folks, this one is going to be hard fought to the end!

This may well mean that the winner isn’t decided till early next week but have no fear, there will be one iPhone given away on this site as soon as we find the worthy winner.

Anyone else planning on going down to the Apple store in The Arndale Centre in Manchester tomorrow???

Let me know… in the comments.

The First British iPhone Giveaway

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:38:44 +0000

Photo credit: TIME

Real Fresh TV, an Internet TV and social media consultancy based in Manchester, UK is offering one lucky winner a free iPhone in the UK’s first iPhone Giveaway.

To enter the UK’s first iPhone Giveaway:

Vote in the online poll below.
Leave a comment telling us which TV show you would most like to watch on an iPhone.

That’s it!

Here’s why are we doing it.

Polling ended.

Results: more than 7 out of 10 voters would watch a music TV show like Transmission with T-Mobile online as well as on terrestrial TV.

Total Votes cast: 139. Votes in favour: 106; Votes against: 33

Competition rules: UPDATED Friday 16th November 18:10 GMT

Only one entry allowed per person.
We have now enabled only postive comment voting to resolve problems with malicious voting down of entries.
The TV show must have aired on UK television at least once in the last 80 years.
We have had to extend the deadline one final time due to problems with voting today.
The comment that has the most votes at midnight on Sunday 18th November wins!
The competition is open to anyone worldwide, however the iPhone will only be delivered to a UK address.
This means that if you live outside the UK but have friends or relatives living in the UK, you can still enter.
New! The winner must be willing to deliver a written review with pictures of their new iPhone to Real Fresh TV within 24 hours of receiving it.
New! The review must be published first on Real Fresh TV.

Entries can be submitted until 23:59 GMT on Sunday, 18th November. Entries after that will be ignored.

The winner will be announced at 09:00am on Monday 19th November.

Good luck!

UPDATE: This Giveaway ended over a year ago! Just saving those of you still entering the effort of commenting. Thanks for your interest.