August 2009 « Souter Consulting Limited

Archive for August, 2009

Please help me raise money for Action for Children #bytenight

Monday, August 10th, 2009

I’ve decided to take part in Byte Night, a rather good Tech Industry fund-raiser, probably because I’ve seen photos of Jenny Agutter in Computing each year, and think it might be a good laugh.

Speak it softly, but I’m sort of looking forward to donning a whole load of technical gear, as my interest in tech is not confining to IT! ;-D

The blurb from the AfC flyer for Newcastle reads:

"Each year, over 500 people from the IT and business community give up their bed for one night to experience a little of what it might be like to be homeless.

The money they raise helps Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness and gets thousands of children and young people off the streets and into secure accommodation with education and training opportunities.

Each year, at least 75,000 children and young people experience homelessness*; 1 in 3 attempt suicide† and 1 in 7 young runaways are physically or sexually assaulted (this figure rises to almost 1 in 2 after a week‡).

Byte Night is a unique event that takes place across the UK. In 2008, it raised £470,000. Now in its 11th year, it is one of the single biggest fundraisers for Action for Children.

Your support of Byte Night is vital to ensuring it continues to support the thousands of vulnerable young people Action for Children work with each year.

Byte Night sleepers range from systems developers to CIOs and business managers to marketers who regularly return each year for a rewarding and memorable experience."

I’m sure you’ll agree that this is an excellent cause, so "Do it, Do it – Do it now!"

Boilerplate from Just Giving, to put your mind at rest:

"Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – I raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity."

Thanks for reading and hope you feel you can contribute to Action for Children.

UPDATE 29/8:

For some reason, an html tag <p style="display: none"> had sneaked into this post, so there appeared to be no content. Hopefully you can see this now… :$
Also, the Byte Night website seems to be down / being worked on, so will keep you posted.

Posted in Business, bonkers, business networking, byte night, enjoyable, experiment, good cause, interesting, newbie, newcastle, north east england, technology, work | Comments

Top Twitter strategy doc from HMG

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

A quick post to republish this document that I found via ‘Government advice urges tweeting’ article on the BBC website.

The source for this is the Cabinet Office’s digital engagement blog. If you are a corporate, then this is for you.

Quoting from the document: “It covers:

Objectives and metrics – why we are using Twitter, and how we will assess its value
Risks and mitigation – how we will contain the risks to our corporate reputation
Channel proposition and management – how we will populate and use the channel
Promotional plan – how we will promote our presence on Twitter to maximise value”

Benefits

The Author, Neil Williams, of BIS, suggests that “some of the benefits I’ve found of having this document in my armoury are:

To get buy-in, explain Twitter’s importance to non-believers and the uninitiated, and face down accusations of bandwagon-jumping
To set clear objectives and metrics to make sure there’s a return on the investment of staff time (and if there isn’t, we’ll stop doing it)
To make sure the channel is used consistently and carefully, to protect corporate reputation from silly mistakes or inappropriate use
To plan varied and interesting content, and enthuse those who will provide it into actively wanting to do so.
As a briefing tool for new starters in the team who will be involved in the management of the channel”

As they say in Parliament: “I commend this to the House”! HMG does *not* in this case allude to a Heavy Machine Gun, but Her Majesty’s Government… ;-D

Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments

Twitter 101 for Business

I thought you may also enjoy this presentation: Twitter 101 for Business

Everything you wanted to know about Twitter and were afraid to ask

A cheeky re-publish of some content from the L’Atelier blog:

“Twitter Director of Media Programming Chloe Sladden and Twitter Director of Mobile Kevin Thau were at (Paris Soma) to introduce Twitter and its strategy, and how the trendy start-up impacts the media scene.”